


Curdled Cream

by GoWithTheFlo20



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Voldemort, Auditory-Tactile Synesthesia, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dark Harry, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Female Lucius Malfoy, Genderbending, Genderbending everywhere, Harry Potter is a Member of the House of Black, Identity Issues, Incest, Lily Potter Is Not Perfect, Loss of Identity, Male Bellatrix Black, Male Narcissa Malfoy, No One In This Fic Is, Older Man/Younger Woman, Parental Sirius Black, Perceived Uncle/Niece, Sibling Incest, Sirius Black Raises Harry Potter, They're All A Little Messed Up, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey... Stuff, he tries his best
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:07:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24743590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoWithTheFlo20/pseuds/GoWithTheFlo20
Summary: Lyra Potter had known for a long while that Sirius Black was a little more than her Godfather, and James Potter a little less. It never really meant much to her. Yet, when both men die on the same day in a freak accident, and a strange man turns up at the funeral calling himself uncle, Lyra finally knew what Sirius meant when he told her sometimes you needed to do something bad to stop yourself from doing something worse.
Relationships: Bellatrix Black Lestrange/Harry Potter, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Regulus Black/Harry Potter, Regulus Black/Harry Potter/Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Sirius Black/James Potter, Sirius Black/Lily Evans Potter
Comments: 57
Kudos: 346





	1. Little Red Boots

It was a fat little thing, spindly and plump and hairy black, throbbing with greed. No one could see its eyes, not with how well concealed the beast was, but it had them. Eight, in fact, rested above a pair of fangs, laying in wait in the heart of its silver spun web. A slight, frail thing of dreadful industry.

Nature at its most severe.

Nature at its most effective.

Cold, hard Darwinism.

The spider slept in the murk, someplace black and bleak and close, the perfect place for going about its business uninterrupted.

The web shook. The spider startled awake.

Music flowed in the air like dust caught in sunlight, shimmering. The spider didn't hear Gnossienne No.4, it only felt the movement, the surge and dip and soaring crescendo. Movement meant prey.

It was a melancholy piece, despite it being played with more precision than emotion. A pretty cover was a pretty cover, regardless of the pages being blank, and the music pulled and twisted, twanging those thin little silver threads.

It dropped from its web, weaving around the cords of its home, scaling over the series of crests and plunges, moving, tip-tapping, swelling with the music. The strings gave way to a smooth lacquered shell, and there, it descended.

Dipping from the piano's front to the glossy hardwood floor, the spider crawled stealthily to the brass pedals, where two shoe clad feet were tip-tapping much like its own legs.

They were a nice pair of shoes. A stark red dyed leather, soft and supple from a year long use, though the laces were still tight enough to dig into delicate ankle their ends were now frayed. They, and the feet inside, peddled away, pushing and pulling the gleaming brass pedals.

The spider came closer.

The shoes moved.

Up, down, closer. Up, down, closer.

The spider crept, slipped and skittered, and just before it could scale the shoe, up the pale delicate leg, the music stopped.

The shoe lurched.

The sole came stomping down.

The spider was crushed underfoot.

Silence, for a heartbeat, for two, a peak down from the young girl playing recital, a cool hard glance, nature at its most severe, nature at its most effective, as pretty as her song, as hollow as it too, and then the swell of music rose once again.

The spider nothing but a smudge of blood on wood.

Lyra Potter knew what they whispered. She knew what everyone whispered. She heard _everything_. Sirius Black flirted just a bit _too_ much with her mother, Lily Potter laughed a bit _too_ hard at his jokes, and James Potter was just a little _too_ blind.

Too much, and, contrarily, not enough.

They got it all wrong, of course. Her mother, Lily, never laughed enough, Sirius didn't flirt, he charmed, and James saw much more than anyone would ever know.

Yet, they whispered, and Lyra listened. Just look at the girl, they said into their flutes of champagne. Silver eyes, hair so dark it was blue in moonlight. Lyra had a face not easy to describe, a face not without beauty, not without character, whatever that meant, but they said she had the Black face. _Devastating._

As she had a Black name. A constellation. Not a flower like her mother, or a true British name from James's family, but a Black name with a Black face and, they whispered as she got older, the Black temperament.

They tutted and tittered and Lyra heard it all.

Lyra thought, when she was younger, her mother found it funny, these strange things adults whispered at parties and in the corners of shops when they saw the young girl. Lily would laugh boisterously, wildly almost, as feral as her red hair and green eyes, and say Lyra was her grandmother's double, for James's mother was a Black. No one bought the flimsy excuse except, perhaps, Lily herself. The most believable of lies were ones you told yourself, in the end.

Lyra saw the cracks when she got older, saw the strain in that smile as Lily said so, heard the hitch in her voice, as Lyra heard _everything_ , and the stress in the laughter, a sound dragged too taut for too long too soon. You had to be careful and gentle with the Glissando, or you might just _snap_ the violin string.

If her Godfather was close to Lyra, closer than perhaps her own mother, for Sirius was Lyra's favourite person in the whole world, it was only because he cared. Cared enough _not_ to give her the Black name.

Lyra had never met any of Sirius's family, and she never really gave it much thought. It seemed to her, so young, she, her mother, James, and Uncle Remus had been his family, and there was no such thing as a time _before_ Lyra, a world _before_ she existed, as many children tend to think.

It had always been _this,_ her mother and James and Sirius, and the rolling hills of Potter Manor.

She had not met a single Black aunt or cousin or brother or sister, though there were plenty of them. Not at Yule. Not at summer solstice. Not even for her birthdays, in which she had sixteen till that fateful day.

The day her father died.

It was a shame, at the time, Lyra didn't know which one that was.

Sirius or James.

Lyra felt as if she was erased. Big, bold bits of her redacted in black. Her sweater was _black_. The buttoned-up dress underneath was _black_. Her tights were _black_. The ribbon holding back her long hair was, like the curls it was restraining, _black_. Even the baby grand piano she sat before was _black_. Ebony, her mother would insist, as if a tone could change the kind. Black was _black._

All apart from her little red leather shoes, pushing at brass peddles.

Her mother called this room the parlour, Sirius had called it Lyra's little nest, and James called it her den. They're still there, in those four walls, Lyra thought. Sirius was in the Chippendale chairs, in the gilt threads of the cushions he picked loose. James was in the Georgian tables, in the scratches of wood he caused when moving the furniture around, and the patch of accidentally stripped wallpaper.

Their ghosts lingered, and Lyra, back straight, fingers nimble, floated along the keys of the piano as April sunshine filtered through the big bay window. There was grey-green woods outside the glass, woods she had played in for years, between the trees and ferns, Sirius chasing her, James counting down from ten before he would start searching.

They lived there too, she thought, in the moss and bark. They haunted her everywhere, and she can turn nowhere and not face her grief. No place is safe, and neither is the music she played. The music Sirius taught her on the piano James bought. She was fifteen, nearly sixteen, and this was her first funeral. _Funerals._ Plural.

The life of an Auror was dangerous, people said. And, Lyra thought, growing up on tales of her father and Godfather's exploits, it would make sense, in a way, if that were what had killed them a week ago. A car accident seemed too… Mundane. Muggle. _Boring._

Completely unlike the two men.

Where was the raining spells and explosions? Where was the great battle and heroic sacrifice? There had been none. Only a mangled metal wreck in a river and two bloated bodies fished out between beds of kelp. Perhaps that was simply death. Something that just… _Happened._ Tediously quick and dull. Like the spider under her boot.

Lyra didn't like the taste of it. Neither did she like the fact her mother, Lily, was sneaking in through the parlour door, watching. For the last week, that was all Lily had done. Watch her, pained, wounded, as if the mere sight of Lyra hurt her. Lyra was hurting too, hurting badly, but that didn't matter. Her mother was too consumed by her own aches, cannibalizing her own anguish until everything else bled out.

Lily Potter was a woman on the cusp of forty, but sometimes Lyra pictured her as a peach. Full of juice and ripe, ready to be picked, if only someone would. If the rumours were true, the rumours Lyra wasn't supposed to know anything about and the ones Lily pretended didn't exist, once upon a time _both_ James and Sirius had taken a bite.

Not a single red strand was out of place in her hair that day, though her step in the heels wobbled, as she, Lily must have thought discreetly, braced a hand on the door frame to steady herself.

Lyra saw it, and Lyra winced. She could almost smell the sting of firewhisky from over the other side of the room wafting on her breath. Her mother was dressed like her, all in black, but with one fatal difference. The peach on the tree wanting to be plucked was gleaming in diamonds. Lily wore them like a dish wore a garnish, beckoning a taste of the finery on display. The finery _freely_ offered.

Lily Potter wanted to be seen grieving, if only to be seen at all.

"Darling, the shoes? I know you have a black pair somewhere. Go put them on. Just this once?"

Lyra's toes furled and unfurled in the red leather. She heard the creak of stitches. It pinched her skin, rubbed against a rather prominent blister on her pinky toe. They were too tight and too small, and one of many little red leather boots she owned. Fifteen, to be exact. One for each birthday. Lyra stacked each one neatly in her closet. They were a gift from Sirius, her beloved _godfather._

The only shoes she needed.

Each year, he would buy a new pair, wrap them up in black tissue paper, in a black silk box, tied together with a black satin ribbon, and hide them out in the woods for Lyra to hunt in the morning, still dressed in her white nighty. Lyra would have no sixteenth pair this year. She would never get a new pair, as Sirius would never sit beside her at the piano again, and James would never ruffle her hair and call her kiddo.

The smile on her mother's face twitched as silence drifted by with the tick-tack of the expensive French grandfather clock. Expensive like her mother's diamonds. Both wanted to be heard. Both wanted to be seen. Lyra blocked them both out.

"Don't do this to me, Lyra. Don't shut me out. Not today. Not. Today."

Yet, that's what Lyra did, sitting still at the piano, as still as she thought Sirius and James would be in their coffins. Lily couldn't live in silence, in the unseen, not like her daughter. Her mother gave up with a sigh, as she always gave up when she wasn't noticed, retrieving a tumbler of firewhisky from the small table set just outside the parlour door, on the hunt for eyes to see. Just outside of Lyra's sight.

She heard Lily all the same.

Heard the clink of crystal.

Lyra wondered if that sounded like a car window caving in.

The sky was blue and clear, and the freshly trimmed grass was as green as her mother's eyes. Lyra wanted to sit in it, pull each blade out by the root and burn the entire lot. She didn't, obviously. She, instead, sat in the front of the decent gathering, a dawdling horde of black, and stared dead ahead at the iron caskets before her.

They were going to be buried next to each other, side by side as they had been in life. Lyra eyed the cavities they were hovering over, big dark earthy mouths. In fifty years' time, inside those dusky iron caskets, Sirius's tissue would have liquefied and disappeared, leaving nothing behind but mummified skin and tendons. By eighty years, James's bones would crack as the soft collagen inside deteriorated, leaving nothing but a brittle mineral frame. A hundred years, less than a wizards life span, and the two would be dust.

Lyra couldn't help it, but she imagined just that. Two of the people she loved most, turning to dust with no wind to blow them away. It would have been kinder to just throw them in the hole, she thought. At least the worms would have a meal.

"James Potter and Sirius Black were, first and foremost, family men. One a devoted husband to his wife, Lily, and the other a devoted Godfather to his goddaughter, Lyra."

The whispers started up, spoken behind lace veils, whispers of the futility of the suffix of God when it was as clear as this day the child was only the latter, but Lyra ignored them. Disregarded them as she Disregarded the Auror giving the eulogy, an Auror who she had never seen or heard James or Sirius speak about. She sat beside her mother in the front row, and she stared dead ahead, and she picture James and Sirius turning to dust in her hands.

Dust she could not hold, no matter how desperately she tried.

Lily, even in repose, even here, at the funeral of her once husband and once lover, ironically separate men, stood out, a bloom amongst the reeds. Yet, if Lyra were to look to her mother, she wouldn't be able to see her gaze. She was wearing sunglasses too big, the posh tortoise shell kind, shielding from the sun-rays and glare.

However, Lyra _knows_. She wasn't crying. Lily hadn't shed a single tear. For a moment, just one, Lyra wanted to believe it was because she had cried all her tears out in the week prior. However, she still reeks of firewhisky, and there was a certain slump to her shoulders, a drag of a hangover slumber. Lyra heard the teeny snores no one else could hear, as she heard the whispers, as she heard the too stale eulogy.

Lyra's little red boots bowed over one another, crisscrossing like scissors.

"-They were both pillars to our community. Great wizards who will be terribly missed-"

Missed by who? These men and women around her? Acquaintances who only knew them in passing? Business partners only remembered in memos to Gringotts? The people who only came to slate a curiosity? People who had nothing better to do on such a sunny day? No, they won't be missed by this mob of morbid spectators. Perhaps they won't even be missed by their slumbering wife and paramour.

"-What it means to be a wizard, to walk through this world with compassion, honesty, integrity-"

A breeze blew and for a flash, Lyra thought she could smell Sirius on the wind. Clove and cinnamon, sweet and spicy. She rolled her face to the sun, closed her eyes as the light bleached it all white. _Clean._ When she opened them, that's when she saw _him._ He was standing over the way, on the hillside, above the funeral. He was still, and silent, hands shoved deep into his pockets.

"-As many of our loved ones are, James and Sirius were taken from us by a cruel twist of fate, for reasons unknown and unknowable-"

Lyra squinted up, but was blind to the sun. The sun he stood before, haloing him in bright fire. He looked like the dark heart of a burning star, she thought. Yet, she could smell Sirius on the wind, taste saccharine and peppery spice, and-

Someone coughed behind her. Lyra startled a glance. When she looked back to the hillside, the man was gone.


	2. Merry Mourners

The breakfast corner in the kitchens of Potter Manor was larger than most kitchens. Sterile too. Big, white-tiled, clinical and precise, a surgeon would look as at home at the steel counters as a butcher would.

Lyra liked the breakfast corner. It was off to the side from the rest of the kitchens, cut off by a half-shaded wall by the largest window. They couldn’t see her there, sitting at the island, the retainers busy at the stoves behind the wall.

Potter Manor didn’t have House Elves. Lily detested the practice, James and Sirius detested her cooking, and as none could do much more than burnt toast, they compromised with hired help. Lyra didn’t know their names, she only knew them, the cooks, as Woman One and Woman Two. She didn’t think she needed to know much more than that.

The duo looked awfully similar, perhaps an aunt and niece, and it was funny, funny to Lyra, that the younger had permed her hair as the elder one had. It made her look like a child running around in her mother’s high heels. Comically old. 

Both were hard-working that day, preparing hors d’oeuvres for the wake, while Woman One sliced, and diced, the younger ladled and poured. And both did what people do best when given time and chance, the very reason why Lyra loved the breakfast corner so much.

They gossiped, and hidden behind the wall, Lyra could listen.

“So who’s going to look after the little Missus now? She was never really close to her mother, was she? And you know she has… Oddities.”

Chop, chop, chop. Tickle, tickle, tickle.

“She’s not a child anymore. She can look after herself. What I want to know is who’s going to look after your husband? That’s the real question, now the _other_ one’s free and on the loose. One man didn’t satisfy her last time, do you really think she’ll stay widowed for long?”

Cut, cut, cut. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“I don’t know what she was thinking. She nearly ruined two families. It’s crucial to keep lineages clear and not so… Muddled. Look at _this_ mess, little Missus is technically the Heir of House Potter, and not a drop of Potter blood. The Potter ancestors must be spinning in their graves.”

Lop, lop, lop. Poke, poke, poke.

“Well, if she’s not a child anymore, do you think she’ll turn out like her mother? The two of them… All alone, rattling around this big, old house. Sounds like trouble to me.”

Slice, slice, slice. Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle.

“Well, neither of them better come sniffing around _my_ Cormac. Not unless they bring their Gringotts keys.”

There was no slicing this time, only cackles over bubbling liquid. The sound, much like the stew on the stove, churned inside Lyra’s gut. So, when Lyra saw Mrs Arabella Fig, an older, stouter woman, their Housekeeper since Lyra could remember, come toddling up the garden path from the large window, the large _open_ window, where voices could drift freely to the woods outside, towards the back door of the kitchens, for the first time that day, she smiled.

Perhaps Lyra wasn’t the only one who snooped, and Mrs Fig must have heard their conversation from the grim slip of her mouth.

“If you don’t mind ladies.”

Caught out at the sudden start of the back door swinging, and the stern, low voice addressing them, Woman One and Woman Two fell silent, sheepish. 

“Sorry Mrs Fig-“

“Sorry won’t serve this food, and sorry won’t pay your rent. You’ll show some respect or _I’ll_ show you both the door.”

There was a clatter of metal on metal, a click-clack-click, the drop of a knife on counter.

“It won’t happen again, Mrs Fig.”

This time, Woman One and Woman Two spoke as one, and this noise grated on Lyra more than any of the snide, spiteful remarks.

“Good. Now, go on, and try to remember where you are.”

More clatter, more clanging, more rattling, but soon, silver platters in hand, Woman One and Woman Two were dashing from the room. They rushed right past Lyra, to the entrance to the house, and didn’t even glance her way.

She thought of kicking her leg out, catching a pale ankle, and pulling. She wondered, if she twisted her foot just so, her little red boot, if they would fall to the tiles below. Fall _wrong._

Would their necks snapping sound like the chop, chop, chopping of onions? Like the crunch of fish being deboned? Like the front window of James’s muggle car imploding as it hit the stone bed of a river?

Lyra pinched her thigh. Pinched and twisted until she winced. It would bruise, a little thumb print of blue, then purple, then mottled yellow.

Sometimes, Sirius told her, as he took her out into the woods to hunt badgers and rabbits and gnomes, a particular sad gleam in his eye after he had found the seven-year-old magically setting fire to a blue jay nest, you had to do something bad before you did something worse.

Pinching was better than snapping, was it not? A bruise would heal, a neck would not. Yet, Lyra wasn’t completely sure. Sirius had been the one to tell what was right and wrong, what to do and what to shove down deep inside and tie up in little red boots, and now… Now he was gone, and these things weren’t so clear anymore, and the laces on her shoes were going to break one day as her feet grew with no new shoes to slip into.

What was she going to do then when there was no more laces left to tie?

Mrs Fig eyed the girl at the breakfast table, siting at the far end, pushed into the corner, obscured. Much like her astonishing silver eyes, as her head was bent low, perched on a tall wooden stool, carefully arranging devilled eggs on a polished serving tray.

Her work was methodical, exact, meticulous, every little attention given to the smallest detail. Whether or not she had been listening to those stupid women was unclear, at least to Mrs Fig, but, she thought, thinking she had not heard would be foolish.

The Healers of Saint Mungo’s diagnosed the girl with auditory-tactile synesthesia when she was four and screamed the house down around their own ears after hearing a china plate dropped and shattered on the floor.

A world where touch and sound was one writhing mass… No wonder the poor thing hid away more often than not. Her parents deciding to home school her rather than let her join her peers at Hogwarts only furthered that chasm. 

“Now I’m worrying I might’ve kept them in the fridge too long. What do you think, Miss Lyra?”

Mrs Fig said softly as she came to a stand beside Lyra’s shoulder, surveying the eggs before them critically. There was no response. The girl merely plucked up another egg from the bowl, head bent nearly flushed with the table, and cracked it on the wood. Rolling her palm over the shattered shell, ear stooped low, listening.

Mrs Fig could see the goose bumps on the back of her hand raise at the crackle from shell splitting beneath a rolling palm.

“You don’t think I was too stingy with the paprika, do you?”

No words, another egg, another crackle. Mrs Fig was used to Lyra’s… Eccentricities. She had helped raise the girl, after all. She knew, after many years of trial and error, how to feel the sounds with her. She liked the sound of shells ripping, found comfort in it like another would find comfort in a well-worn blanket. Solace and calm.

“I guess they’ll do. But you watch you don’t get any on yourself. Or your mother will skin us both.”

Mrs Fig shuffled off, the door closed behind her, missing the sound of an egg being flung full force at the wall, the splatter and spray and scatter of eggshell turning to tiny jagged shards.

Lyra didn’t know how long she waited, gazing at the mark on the wall, the streak left by the egg she had hurled. The white tile was tarnished, sullied by the smeared yoke and bits of eggshell, dappled with spices, like a comet, staining. Staining as sound soiled her.

Like the sound outside the kitchen, a swelling chatter and chirp that sounded almost… _Jolly_. She could feel that noise like one would feel a pinprick, a stream of piercing needles up her spine. She knew she was frowning darkly long before the muscles between her brows ached and throbbed.

Turning her head to the door, Lyra wiped her hands off on the dishtowel resting over her lap, rising from her seat. She didn’t magic the wall clean of wrecked egg, wipe away the speckled comet of ruin, nor did she magic away the mess of shells on the table, plucked free and stacked in a neat little pile.

Oddly, she wanted someone to find it, this mess, and sigh deeply. Feel as tired as she felt, and perhaps come to know why hearing their mirth at her father’s wake felt like needles in her vertebrae.

Drawing near the swinging door to the dining room, Lyra hesitated. The noise from beyond the wood washed over her like cold rain. Cold rain that felt like fog in her lungs. Then the stab came, the sharp twisting poker in her calf.

Her mother’s laughter.

It was forced, pushed, pressed into something high and keen and ugly. Lyra pushed the door open and strolled into the dining room. She should have known what she would come to see on the other side.

There _he_ was.

The man from the hillside. He was standing in the cluster of a small crowd of merry mourners, and her mother, Lily, was beside him, one hand clutched around the long stem of a nearly empty wine glass, and the other slung through his crooked arm, as if she were afraid she’d fall over if she let go. Or that he’d get away. Maybe, Lyra thought, it was a bit of both.

Yet, it wasn’t her mother Lyra found her attention captured by, but him. He was tall, towering in sleek lines, broad shouldered, with a handsome unlined face, almost boyish, hair shiny and clean, almost blue-black in the low light, sawn short at his ears and parted at the side. He looked like Sirius. Dangerously so. He was missing the greys peppered at his temple, and the immaculately trimmed beard, bare faced and jaw cut keenly instead, but there he was. Sirius Black minus a decade or two.

He wasn’t dressed for a funeral, Lyra thought strangely. He was clad in a steel grey three-piece suit, as cutting and clinical as the kitchen counters at her back. His shoes were… Red. Dark red, so dark it was almost black, but _red._ Red like her little boots. Whatever he was, whoever he was, he was in her dining room, and she wanted him gone when she watched her mother unsuccessfully stifle another laugh. The sound felt like a cheese grater on her soles.

Lily spotted her.

“Lyra! Lyra, darling, come and say hello to your Uncle Regulus!”

There it was. Something Lyra had been waiting years for. An admission. It didn’t taste as sweet as she thought it would, given under a drunken stumble. Lyra wasn’t the only other person to notice the slip too, as the small merry mourners flickered there gazes at each other, murmuring into their own drinks.

_Come and say hello to your Uncle Regulus._

James Potter didn’t have a brother. There was no uncles and aunts to be found in the Potter tree. James had been an only child from only children five generations back. Lyra _Potter_ shouldn’t have an uncle. Nevertheless, here he was, and really, the only person Lily was fooling with Lyra’s name was herself.

She was surprised, however, as drunk as she seemingly was, Lily would say anything like this, even by accident. She had been so careful before, so adamant. So had Sirius and James. Potter, Potter, Potter, like the dripping of a tap left running.

That’s when Lyra saw it, in the crinkle of her mother’s eye, in the shade of lipstick she wore, smeared on her glass. _Desperation._ Lily wanted Sirius, in any form, in any shape. Sorrow makes people desperate.

Desperate enough to cling onto a man who, though he looked like Sirius, definitely _wasn’t_. Desperate enough to through caution to the wind, and to throw sixteen years’ worth of Potter pedantics away. Desperate enough to use Lyra as a lure.

_Here’s your niece, come look, come stay. _

Or maybe, just maybe, Lily was sick and tired of the people around them judging, always judging, and what was the point anymore, with Sirius and James gone?

Lyra didn't know. Lyra didn't care. Sirius had never told her he had a brother.

“Lyra don’t be rude! Come and say hello!”

Yet, Lyra’s feet, her little red boots, had a mind of their own, taking root in the ground, unmoveable and stagnant.

Regulus met her eye. No, certainly not Sirius. Sirius’s eyes were bright, so light they were almost white, shocking in their twinkle. Regulus had moonlight eyes. Cold and grey and distant. Just like Lyra’s. James used to call her moonbeam.

Regulus winked at her.

Lily only tutted disapprovingly, and Lyra could feel that tapping on the back of her eyeballs, tugging tightly on the arm of the Sirius-not-Sirius in her grasp.

“She can be a little… Standoffish sometimes. Don’t take it to heart. I don’t know where she got it from. Sirius used to be so charming, and sociable and-“

“And dead.”

Her mother flushed pink, then scarlet, than white, much like the bruise forming on Lyra's thigh would cycle through a life of colour. Lily was either embarrassed or enraged, it was hard to tell when her mouth flapped like it did. Lyra only felt… Good. Croaky, but good. It was the first time she had spoken since being awoke a week ago, her mother blubbering in her duvet, wailing, an Auror at their door with a sad little frown and empty platitudes.

“My father is dead.” 

There was no more sound. No more laughter. No more whispers. No more tuts or tats or tittering. Lyra found movement again, flooding back in a gigantic wave, and she was swivelling, spinning, marching back to the kitchen door.

Her father was dead.

She mouthed it over and over and over again until her lips bled numb.

Her father was dead.

Before she slipped through the kitchen door, Lyra could hear Lily chirping anew, just like that annoying fuckin' blue jay when she was seven, trying to divert from the deafening silence of a girl declaring her father dead.

“I swear this is some sort of miracle, Reg. Sirius used to say you were lost forever-“

The door swung shut with a thud and a clack. He should have stayed lost, Lyra thought. Her father was dead, and no matter how much Lily wanted to have him back, as desperately as she needed any old peg to fit the hole in her chest, Sirius was not coming back.

Her father was dead.

The echo of those words tumbling between her teeth _burned._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT CHAPTER PREVIEW:
> 
> "Hello, Lyra."
> 
> Lyra didn't jump at the voice atop of her, behind, above on the landing of the wide curving staircase she had accosted as a refuge. Uncle Regulus was lounging at the smooth banister, sleek and silky, with his red, red shoes, and his hands packed into his slack's pockets, slight smile on his face.
> 
> He had been watching her, she knew, and there was no telling for how long. He reminded her of the willows at the edges of Potter Manor then, tall and towering, and no matter how far she ducked, skirted down deep on her belly, his spindly spines would still get caught in her hair and yank.
> 
> "Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you."
> 
> Lyra didn't miss a beat.
> 
> "You didn't."


	3. Fear, Frowns and Frustration.

Alcohol was a style of magic, Lyra believed. It loosened a man's jaw quicker than a blathering jinx. By the time the afternoon wake drained into the late evening soiree, nearly all of the funeral guests were under its heady spell.

Lyra wasn't. Instead, she sat upon the spiralling eastern stairwell, halfway between foyer and the safety of her bedroom, listening to strangers fingering through their belongings, spilling stains on their rugs, and, predictably, the drunken babble lurking beneath the sound of champagne.

She hated that noise, the fizz it created in the air, as if there was static around them, it _felt_ like static, behind every breath and every movement, until it was all a little hazy, all a little surreal, just a show on one of the muggle TVs her mother kept. Here, each person was a channel, each conversation a program, and tonight's news centered on Lyra's broken family.

"I wonder if she'll sell up and move out?"

"Don't count on it. From what my nephew knows, you know my boy Finnick who works at the Ministry? She's been well-taken care of and then some."

"It's too bad, my husband would have loved buying this place. We're distant cousins to the Potters, anyhow. My great, second removed, twice married adopted aunt was-"

"I'd kill for some of this crystal. Do you think they'd miss a piece if one, _maybe_ , fell into my handbag?"

"Hell of a way to go, don't you think?"

"I just hope it was quick."

"Closed casket, did you see?"

"No I didn't see, Love. I think that was the point."

"From what I understand, the Auror's are ruling it a muggle mishap. Car crash, they say."

"I think we all know what that means. _Drinking._ "

"Ulrich was there when they brought the bodies into the morgue in Saint Mungo's."

"What did he say?"

"He said he'll be off pulled pork for the next year."

"James didn't _drink._ My Lucas worked with him in the Auror department, said James didn't touch the stuff, even at the yule parties. Never touched a drop."

"Unlike his wife and her lover…"

Slowly, gently, the conversations shifted heart, slipped from day to night, and these too, Lyra lapped up.

"He has a Mastery in Defence Against The Dark Arts, did you know?"

"Graduated Hogwarts top of his year."

"He studied a year in Durmstrang, dark artifacts I believe. Just got back from Eastern Russia six months ago."

"He spent a year in Peru, I think, helping the Curse Breakers dismantle a hex on the dig they were undertaking."

"I heard he was commencing a Healers apprenticeship in Northern France. Only came back a week ago to-"

"Such an awful thing to come home to…"

"Imagine it, you're travelling the world, and as soon as you step foot on home soil, it's to news of your own brother's funeral."

"Walburga must be a mess. Terrible thing of that Lily to ban the Blacks from coming."

"She quickly changed her mind when she saw the dashing Regulus on the doorstep, though, didn't she? I might've too if he smiled at me like _that._ "

"Never did understand their dislike for the Blacks. Fine family, good stock, filthy rich."

"At least little Lyra has family now, with her father gone and all, and her mother finally coming clean, drowning herself in the rosé as she is."

"Regulus might be able to talk sense into Lily and let the poor lass meet the rest of her extended family too…"

"It's not much of a welcome is it? Did you see Lyra? Why I _never_. There's something wrong with that girl, I'll tell you that much. Terribly wrong."

"This is what Regulus needs after this terrible news. Some family to-"

"Not much of a family. A wild widow and a little weirdo. He's better off running."

"And a dragon's hoard worth of cash. Potter left the house and half the Potter vaults to the girl, despite her… Origin."

"Sirius, well, he left everything to Lyra, did you know? Not a galleon or sickle to Lily. The girls set once she turns seventeen."

"Maybe I should introduce my son to her one day. Strapping lad, everybody always says how handsome he is. Perhaps he'd… Settle Lyra a bit."

"Sirius and James let her get away with murder. No way for a Lady to behave-"

"Did you hear? Regulus was on the front-lines in Bulgaria when they were hit with a-"

"He's a war veteran-"

"He's a Minister-"

"He's a Potions Master-"

"He's a Professor-"

"He's-"

_Regulus, Regulus, Regulus, Regulus._

No one, not a soul, not a single sentence, spoke of Sirius or James. Just the wild widow, the little weirdo, and the returning prodigal brother. It had been there a while now, Lyra thought, this anger she could suddenly name, could suddenly feel festering beneath the surface like a disease. She was angry, and she had been angry for a long, long while. At who, however, she couldn't tell.

Maybe it was everyone.

Lyra got up, her boots squeaking on the hardwood, the only noise she had made in an hour, and turned to trek up the snaking stairs, up to her bedroom, up to the dark and noiseless night where she could _think._

"Hello, Lyra."

Lyra didn't jump at the voice atop of her, behind, above on the landing of the wide curving staircase she had accosted off as a refuge. Uncle Regulus was lounging at the smooth banister, sleek and silky, with his red, red shoes, and his hands packed into his slack's pockets, slight smile on his face.

He had been watching her, she knew, up on the top floor, and there was no telling for how long. He must have taken the west wing staircase up and slunk in from behind her. That's what she would have done if she had been hunting.

He reminded her of the willows in Bodmin moor then, tall and towering, and no matter how far she ducked, skirted down deep on her belly, his spindly spines would still get caught in her hair and yank.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you."

Lyra didn't miss a beat.

"You didn't."

There was a focus on her she wasn't quite used to. A potent spotlight. He listened to her as if her words were golden, and he a goblin, stashing even the smallest of coins. His own shoes whined on the wood, as he slid in closer, balancing on the edge of his staircase step, grin growing.

"Touché. Let me guess… Auditory-tactile synesthesia?"

Her gaze shot to his hand. A thin, nimble thing, long fingered and elegant, drum, drum, drumming away on the banister. He stopped under her scowl, but looked all the more cheerier for it. There was no point in answering yes or no now, her glare at his thrumming fingers had said it all, and he knew that too.

"Don't worry, your mother didn't say anything. You have a cousin, Belenos, who suffers from the same malady. Having grown up with his… Brilliant company, I think I can spot it anywhere. They call it the Black curse, your great uncle and great grandfather had it too. Makes us terrible conversationalists, but magnificent musicians. Belenos prefers the harp, but I do think I spied a delightful little piano in the back room. Yours, I presume?"

Lyra blinked, and nothing more. His voice felt like feathers on her skin, itching, tickling. It didn't deter the man on the stairs, not how it deterred most people, the silence.

"Perhaps you would like to meet him? I'm sure your mother wouldn't mind Belenos visiting, after how well we've gotten on tonight."

There was the trap. The catch her mother couldn't see. You left enough room for one Black to slink in, and they all came washing up on the shore. The only thing more persistent than a dog with a bone, Sirius used to tell her, was a Black with a plan. Still, his voice tickled, and Lyra almost wanted to laugh. She didn't. She didn't say anything.

"It's a bad habit, you know."

Her head cocked.

"Sneaking up on people?"

A lone, dark brow tilted high, but the smile on his face never waned. That was how Sirius used to look at her, right after she had finished a rather hard piece of sheet music. Proud, but tacit.

"Eavesdropping. I suppose both of us have a few bad habits, yes? How about we start again? I'm Regulus, your Uncle. It's nice to meet you, Lyra… At last."

He paused for a heartbeat.

"I'm very sorry for your loss."

That was… Strange. Most of the visitors, those who had bothered to offer condolences, wept about how much they would miss them, how much they were sorry, how much they thought this or that, they, they, they, never _you_.

"It's your loss too."

He nodded, stilted and stiff, a swift, sharp up and down tilt to that cutting jawline.

"Yes, you're right. Did you know I hadn't seen my brother in over twenty-five years? Not since he stormed out of Grimmauld Place with a rucksack and… And now I never will again. It's odd, is it not? How fast things can change with the spin of a wheel. Sirius would have never let me set foot in this house, and here I am… Speaking to you. I can't say I'm entirely remorseful. Still…"

He looked broke unexpectedly, like torn parchment stitched back together, as if he had spent every smile and found his chest empty, and he didn't look so young, not anymore, not with that faraway look in his eye.

"I'll never know what kind of man my brother grew to be after he ran away from home. What kind of husband he was, what kind of father."

Her little red boot raised, crept, up, up, and Lyra found herself climbing a step, nearer to the man with old moonbeam eyes and her father's smile, and something shadowy between his teeth.

"Loving, devoted, and a pillar of the community. That's what they said at the funeral, anyway. Or perhaps you couldn't hear from all the way over on the hill."

The smile came back full bloom.

"I heard just fine, especially your mother's quaint little snores. Dreadful thing, falling asleep at a funeral, I think you-… But I want to know who Sirius was to _you_ , Lyra."

Who was Sirius to her? A father who she was never allowed to call father? The man who smiled woefully at her, equal parts proud and jaded? Who bought her red shoes for her birthday, and took her hunting to stop her burning blue jay nests?

"He loved me. He loved me more than anyone else did or does. But I think… I don't think he _liked_ me. There's a difference, isn't there? You can love something, and not like it at the same time. Like the kneazle who keeps nipping at your fingers. I think I reminded him of things he had tried to runaway from. Things he wanted to forget but couldn't. Sirius loved me… But he didn't want to. That's the man he was."

And that was the truth. Perhaps Sirius didn't know _she_ knew, perhaps he had not realized that while he had been watching, she watched back. Yet, she did, and she saw the frost, the winter always skulking on the edges of her relationships. Little flashes of fear, frowns, and frustration.

_You can't just push people, especially when you're on the stairs, Lyra, you could have really hurt her. Lyra, put the knife back, no more sneaking cutlery. Lyra, did you steal this from the potions store cupboard? Mandrake root can make people very sick, not sleepy. Promise me you won't steal anymore._

"If it helps, Sirius didn't _like_ me either. He didn't particularly like _any_ of his family. Perhaps you were a little too Black for his tastes. Yet, I'm sure that just means we'll get along fine, don't you think? I know the rest of the family wants to meet you. They would have been here tonight if-… Well, I came, and I know I've enjoyed meeting you."

There was an offer there, an invitation she couldn't quite see in the murk of the upstairs, in the erudite voice of a faraway Uncle. An Uncle who no one really knew where, when, and what he had been doing for so many years. Minister, Professor, Potioneer, Curse Breaker.

"You talk like a bad stage-play."

Uncle Regulus seemed oddly pleased by this remark.

"You'll find most people do."

He started drumming again, tip, tap, tip, tap.

"Do you know why you feel at a disadvantage right now?"

Lyra grinned. People hated her smile. Her mother groaned about it around the corners and bends, places she thought Lyra couldn't reach, to James and Sirius. Said she showed too much teeth, too much fang. Too unsettling. _Don't smile like that Lyra… Just… Don't._

"Because I didn't know you existed until today?"

Uncle Regulus matched it with his own too-much-teeth-grin.

"Because you're standing below me on the stairs. That means I can look _down_ on you, but you have to look _up_ at me."

He shrugged, and even this was sleek, like the stretching of a great feline.

"It's basic stuff, really. Never let anyone, apart from yourself, take the high ground. It's worth paying attention to."

Lyra had never really been good at impulse control, on not taking a dare, despite all the hunting lessons Sirius had taken her on. And this _was_ a dare. A provocation. A fun little tease. She took a step. Then another. Another. Another. One more. The last. All the way until she was up on the second-floor landing, standing face to face with Uncle Regulus.

She was tall.

He was taller.

She took two steps more just to meet him eye to eye.

"You see? Simple."

He said, but then he was smiling playfully, eyes twinkling, moonbeams scattered with stardust.

"Like how I got you to walk up the stairs just now."

If Lyra resented this little exercise, she kept it to herself. If she felt a little thrill of something squirming in her gut, a bit sickening like mandrake root, that too was buried.

"Do you enjoy playing games, Uncle Regulus?"

Her voice was cool, but Uncle Regulus's voice was cooler.

"Life is about finding ways to keep yourself amused."

The moment was peculiar, tense in a way Lyra didn't know moments could be tense. As if all of the air around them was stretchy and springy, wrenched rigid, threatening to burst. Uncle Regulus was the one to break it, burst the air with a bang, as he turned and started strolling back down the stairs.

"Enjoy the party, Lyra. These things are for the living, not the dead."

But then he halted halfway down, and it didn't escape Lyra's notice that he stood exactly where she had seconds before. Did he feel at a disadvantage?

"Oh, and in about sixty seconds, your mother is going to tell you that I will be staying here for a while. She'll present it as a done deal, what's best for you, but it's your choice, and I want you to have your say."

And like Uncle Regulus, Lyra began drumming on the banister.

"Why?"

"Because it's important to me. I'll leave it up to you. Say the word and I'll go."

He waited, half turned, profile in candlelight. She didn't say anything. The flickering glow made the smile on his face impossibly soft. _Deceptively_ soft.

Uncle Regulus took a right when he reached the bottom of the stairs, and Lyra watched him until he vanished around the corner. Seconds later, from the left, the opposite direction, Lily came ambling over. Her mother looked up, spotted Lyra on the second-floor landing.

"There you are!"

Lily tottered to the bottom of the stairs, face flushed, leaning heavily on the newel post.

"Darling, I've been looking all over for you. I've got some wonderful news. I've been talking to your Uncle, and we both think being around family is the most important thing for you right now. So he's going to be staying for a couple of weeks. I think you'll like him…"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT CHAPTER PREVIEW:   
> Lyra often thought of her home in snapshots, like a stack of photographs flicked through too fast. Wind in the trees. Dew on the grass. The sun shining down. Land that is lush, expansive, isolated.
> 
> Gardens. Hedgerows. Trellises. Stone benches. Wicker lounges. A gazebo painted white. Karma Koi in the pond. Robins on the lawn. Blue jays in the birdbath. A black weathervane spinning lazily above the Griffins bedding barn.
> 
> Eaves, chimneys, a wraparound porch. Black shutters, white clapboards, a red front door the same shade as her little red boots. A large black kneazle sitting on the flagstone terrace, licking its paws, calmly surveying the scene with the same disinterest as Lyra.
> 
> It was all very picture postcard. It was all very nauseating.


	4. The Smiling Man

Lyra often thought of her home in snapshots, like a stack of photographs flicked through too fast. Wind in the trees. Dew on the grass. The sun shining down. Land that is lush, expansive, _isolated._

Gardens. Hedgerows. Trellises. Stone benches. Wicker lounges. A gazebo painted white five decades ago. Karma Koi in the pond down south. Robins hopping across the boarders of the front lawn, where woods met pasture. Blue jays in a birdbath. A black weathervane spinning lazily above the griffins bedding barn. Eaves and chimneys, a wraparound porch. Black shutters on white clapboards, and a red front door the same colour as her shoes. A large grey kneazle sitting on the flagstone terrace, licking the blood from its paws, belly filled with mouse bones, calmly surveying the scene with the same disinterest as Lyra.

It was all very picture postcard.

It was all very nauseating.

And there Lyra sat, in the mist and smog of all this fine backdrop, in her little breakfast nook, staring out the bay windows to the back-garden meadow.

She was out of black that day, instead slipped and sealed in stippled tones of bleak. Her shirt, her skirt, her tights, the headband pushing back curls, all a mottled dove grey, softer than a feather. 

Of course, apart from her dear shoes, made redder by the dreary qualities she dished herself in. As if all her blood was housed in the soles of her feet. Her wounds too. All those little hurts.

It seemed to Lyra this was only a small step down from her funeral dress, Alice in Wonderland meets Edward Gorey.

On the table before her, wax seal already cut off and cork popped, a bottle of hangover potion.

All was silent for a while, as silent as the piano had been over the last few days, and then Lyra felt it much before she heard it, as she often did in a world where sound had fingers to touch and tweak with, a forgiving reel of thunder rolling across the soft skin on the underside of her arms.

“Miss Fig? Miss Fig!”

The kitchen doors swung open, Lily Potter strolling into the room, dressed for the day as most other’s would only dress for the evening. Lyra could see her mouth though, an angry, red-painted slash across her face, pierced and tight like a scar that had not fully healed.

It seemed the affects of last night’s drinks had not completely bled themselves out from her dreams.

“Miss Fig! Miss-“

Those impossibly green eyes of her mother, eyes Lyra had always wished she had, warm things, bright things, so unlike her cold grey stare, found her pushed in at the far corner by the large bay window. But did Lily _truly_ see her?

No, Lyra didn’t think so.

“Oh! There you are. Good morning, darling…”

There are plenty of darlings to be had, beloveds too, if Lyra took the time to count them, but no kisses, no hugs, no lingering hands on shoulders. That was Sirius and James, and Lily, with her bright warm eyes, can’t step into dead men’s shoes. Even if she could, she would not want to, Lyra thought. A darling was easy to give, a twist of a tongue in air, a kiss would smear painstakingly painted lipstick. Lyra’s gaze drifted from her mother, back to the window.

“It’s afternoon.”

Lily hesitated for a breath, and although Lyra could not see her glance to the clock on the wall, she knew she had.

“What? No-… Yes… Yes, I suppose it is. Have you seen Miss Fig?”

“No.”

The clacking of her mother’s heels on tile sent a pitter-patter-pinch on her hip.

“How strange. I could have sworn I heard the floo earlier… Well, I hope she doesn’t leave us in the lurch today of all days.”

Her mother ran out of gas, rubbing a pale ring bejewelled finger at her temple, patting carefully coiled copper curls down.

“Lyra, darling, do you think you could-“

Finally, Lily spotted the hangover potion already open on the table.

“Oh, that’s a good girl. Thank you.”

Lily picked up the vile. Downed it in one. A stiff swallow, it must have been.

“What are your plans for today?”

Lyra shrugged.

“I thought I would stop the clocks. Cover all the mirrors. Perhaps I would build a pyre to guide the spirits of the recently deceased safely to the other side. Maybe I-“

Her mother tutted, a snap of tongue on the roof of her mouth behind such bright teeth below such bright eyes, and the noise stung the flesh of Lyra’s cheeks.

“Don’t be morbid, Lyra.”

Lily didn’t let her answer.

Perhaps she was scared of what that answer could possibly be.

“I was thinking of heading into Hogsmeade today. I thought you might like to come. We can stop for ice-cream at Florean Fortescue’s?”

Another bout of silence, as hazy as the misty afternoon outside.

“Did you know in Victorian times a widow was expected to mourn her husband for two years? At the very least.”

Such bright warm eyes.

So very, very blind.

“Well, we don’t live in Victorian times, thank Merlin.”

Lyra nodded.

“Of course, I would have gotten off a little more easily. It’s only nine months if you lose a parent… But that’s not quite right is it? I had two fathers, didn’t I? One by name, and one by blood, so is it nine months or eighteen?”

Lily won’t answer that question. She never has, and she never would. Not outrightly. One more snap of a tongue that felt like a slap across her face. 

“I’m sorry to hear that. I was hoping for some company.”

Was she even listening at all?

Probably not.

Soft warm things rotted in the dark and damp, and Lyra, that day, felt like a thunder cloud, the essence of dark and damp things, dressed all in grey, far off and extreme.

“You were hoping I would drive you.”

Sirius had taught her how to drive, when James had been at work, and Lily at her Charms Mastery classes, when and where no one could tell him not to. He might not have been much of a Black, but a Black Sirius still was, and breaking a few conventions and rules was in their blood.

“I can drive myself, thank you very much.”

No, she couldn’t. Lily was a terrible driver.

They both knew it.

And perhaps that was what made Lyra feel a little spiteful, a tiny vindictive, a petite malicious.

Why did Lily get to have all the soft, warm, bright things?

Why couldn’t Lyra get one last driving lesson?

Who the fuck cared about ice-cream while her fathers were decomposing in the black?

Why did no one ever listen when she spoke?

“Unfortunately, I have to stay home and make jewellery out of father’s hair.”

It was the ambiguous _father_ that did it. A gasp that felt like cool water on blistered skin. Soothing. 

“Lyra…”

“I was thinking of a brooch.”

“Please, Lyra, will you-“

“Or a ring. Would you prefer a ring, mother?”

“Lyra!”

It was a shrill noise. A sharp noise. The noise of a woman at the end of her rope. A beat of silence.

“Sorry.”

And she meant it, truly, she did. Lyra couldn’t help herself sometimes. Some children burnt down ant hills. Others picked the wings off mayflies. A Few threw tantrums and kicked at shins. Others held their breath until they were blue in the face. Yet, those were conventional, orthodox, and Lyra had never been a typical child.

Lyra was a child, and now halfway to a woman, who liked pressing buttons.

The bigger the button, the harder she would press.

Circe help you if that button was as red as her shoes.

Her mother had such large, pretty buttons, many of them as fiery as her hair. Perhaps that was why Sirius had liked her so. There was no more vindication to be felt than being around something that you knew you shouldn’t, and then not doing what you so terribly wanted to. _See, I can be good too._

Maybe, just maybe, Sirius had been more a Black than he would have ever liked to be.

Maybe, just maybe, Lyra had no idea.

“It’s alright. We all have different ways of… Expressing our grief.”

A nod, nothing more.

“So it would seem.”

Was that what all this was? The firewhisky and the finery? All a little wash to try and scrub off the touch of death? Pointless, Lyra thought, if she were to go clinging to Uncle Regulus after. He _wasn’t_ Sirius. Lyra thought you couldn’t get further from Sirius than his brother.

“Whatever are you looking at out there? Lyra?”

The pitter-patter-pinch, the looming shadow of her mother, the smell of honeysuckle and peach perfume.

“What could possibly be so interesting that you won’t even look at m-“

Lily was close enough to see out the window now, close enough to see what Lyra could.

Uncle Regulus was sitting outside in the garden, relaxing on a lounge chair, back to them, facing the woods. He had just hung up a small, black phone. Pressed it back into his slack’s pocket. As if he knew they were watching, _of course he bloody knows,_ he turned around, glanced over crisp shirt shoulder, and waved.

_A bad stage-play, indeed._

It worked wonders on her mother, though. She brightened beside Lyra, as if she could shrink her shadows and liquor breath back into the folds of her skin, and merrily waved back. When she spoke, it wasn’t to Lyra. That attempt at conversation was well and truly gone.

She had found something sparkling to dip her fingers in, better and more polished than her rings, and for a moment, forget the cold of death and an empty marriage bed.

“Maybe I should ask your Uncle Regulus to take me…”

Lily walked away, towards the kitchen door, leaving Lyra sitting by herself. For a flash, Lyra wanted to shout at her back.

_Please don’t leave me too._

_I’m sorry I have thorns._

_I’m sorry I don’t know how to speak your language. Sirius never thought to teach me it._

But she didn’t.

She couldn’t.

Lily paused at the doorway.

“And maybe we’ll bring you back some ice-cream.”

The door clicked behind her mother, a shiver down her leg, and Lyra only answered when the house had fallen silent.

The only time she had a voice when there was nothing else to drown her out. Thunder clouds could not roll across clear blue skies, and flaming suns could not break through a rain-cloud. They walked in different worlds, Lyra and her mother, spoke in raindrops and sunbeams, and nothing else.

“You’re only going to find ghosts.”

Lyra watched from her bedroom window as the garage door rose, and though no motorbike came peeling out, _Sirius was gone,_ a silver convertible did make a slow crawl across the gravel and grit. A crunch she could hear through the glass. A gnaw that tickled the palms of her hands.

Uncle Regulus was behind the wheel.

Shirt sleeves rolled to elbow.

Sunglasses over steely gaze.

He was looking at her, through the rear-view mirror, reflected from a window, she knew, despite not seeing those eyes. He _saw_ just as she did.

He tapped away something on that little black phone of his before dashing it down into the glove box, must have said something innocuous like _work, am I right?,_ by the way her mother flung her head back and laughed. It wasn't a funny joke, and still her mother would laugh hard. 

Lily sat beside him, finishing wrapping her head in a brightly coloured scarf. The top of the convertible was down, and as the engine purred, as the wheels chewed gravel, the tail end of that scarf fluttering down the drive reminded Lyra of a comet.

And then Lyra was alone except for the tick-tock of the clock on the mantelpiece.

She spent her day in snapshots. Sitting at the piano, hands in her lap, music dry and parched in her chest.

She stood at the window, many windows, fiddling with the golden tassels of the curtains, looking out across the empty driveway.

She sat on the couch, stiff backed as the furniture, unopened book beside her on the cushions.

She stood at a window before an empty driveway.

She laid across the fur rugs, spread out, pelt tickling her cheek, dead with no heartbeat.

She stood at a window before an empty driveway.

She laid face-down upon her downy bed and screamed until her lungs were hoarse.

She stood at a window before an empty driveway.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

The light outside grew dim.

The shadows in the house grew black and fat.

She was tired, she was restless, and she wandered the large empty house before the large empty driveway. She made a circuit of it. From parlour to foyer, from foyer to kitchen, from kitchen to dining room, from dining room to living room, from living room to foyer, and back all over again.

By the time she stopped at the foot of the grand staircase for the third time, starting up the steps, runner muffling the sound of her steps, she knew where she was going. Where she had been fighting not to go all along. 

_Maybe I can't be good after all._

Yet, she still took her time. Savoured each sluggish step. The encroaching walk. The _hunt._

When she got to the second-floor landing, she glanced down the winding hall, all the way to the back of the manor house.

The door at the far end was shut, but it was not locked or warded. It was nothing less than an invitation. 

The brass knob turned in her palm, a pulse and the door swung open. Lyra moved into the room.

The bed was perched right in the middle of the small guest room, carefully made, neat and tidy, corners tipped and tied into the mattress like one would find in a military bunker or a hospital. Starchy rigid.

The men’s hairbrush on the bureau was polished grey, no hairs left between bristles.

A sweater, cashmere, a dark cloudy colour, was tenderly draped over the back of a chair, the suitcase standing upright on the floor nearest the closet…

Uncle Regulus’s suitcase.

Lyra stepped further into the room; gaze caught on that suitcase, the smell of his peppery cologne tickling her nose.

It was a sombre grey, like his eyes, like his suit, like everything else he owned, as if he and everything he touched was made smoke and ash, perhaps even herself in her rain-cloud shirt and skirt. However, there, around the grey, like his dark, dark red shoes, like her own little red boots, was a trimming around the edges of red ruffle.

It was a charming suitcase, Lyra thought, and, for the moment, undisturbed.

She took another step towards it.

_Ring-ding-dong._

__

She left nothing disturbed in that room, not a sign or sniff she had walked those carpets before she answered the ringing front door. Strange, however, that the wards had not gone off long before the doorbell could have been rung.

Perhaps her mother had forgotten her purse.

No, she would not ring the doorbell to enter her own home.

Perhaps Miss Fig was finally coming to work today, several hours too late, but sorely missed.

Perhaps-

Lyra opened the red front door.

It was not her mother.

It was not Miss Fig.

It was not Cook One or Cook two.

It was not Hagrid, their part-time groundskeeper.

It was not Miss’s McGonagall, Lyra’s summertime tutor with the severe bun but the balmy smile. 

It was not even Kingsley, her father’s friend who sometimes popped around for a chat on a Thursday morning.

Neither was it this shiny-new Uncle Regulus.

It was a stranger.

A man.

A smiling man.

He was tall, taller than she, taller than Sirius had been, taller than even Uncle Regulus, but he wore his height well. Keenly. Sharply. Angled beneath those black slacks, black jumper, black scarf, black coat, black, black, black-

_Shoes._

His shoes were a stark red.

Lyra always looked to clothes first. They said a lot about a person. Faces? Expressions? Those were involuntary, a belt or a shirt was a choice, a hint, a sign, equally as telling as a grin or a wince.

From red shoes she finally took a gander at his grinning face.

He was handsome in the way an overgrown flower garden could be beautiful, when the roses were strangled by weeds, and moss and mushrooms had pierced through rock bed and devoured the pansies. Or the banks of an overflowing river, when the foamy waters drank houses deep, and salt-stained roads made cars skid and crash. Things that spilled out and got salvaged by something wild. If he were music, music Lyra so adored, he would be a piece with no diminuendo, only a clashing crescendo stitched together from jarring bits of arpeggio. 

A little bit wild, a little bit feral, and a little bit unrelenting.

His hair was long, dense tresses, twisted and knotted as her own, brushing broad shoulder, shining black in the dusk. His grin was bright and sharp, all white teeth prettily lined in a row, dimpled in the corners, softened only by the skim of a neatly trimmed beard that did nothing to hide the strong slope of his jaw. He was heavy-lidded, the way Sirius had been, though there was no moonbeam eye, not even steel grey like Uncle Regulus, only a iron so dark it was almost black, as if his pupils had bled into his iris.

The grin grew.

“Hello Lyra. I’m your cousin, Belenos. Fancy letting me in for a cuppa?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Chapter Preview: 
> 
> Pushing open the swing door to the kitchen, Lyra entered into the scene of domesticity, much like a spider descended from its web. Uncle Regulus and Lily were unpacking the groceries on the kitchen island. 
> 
> No. 
> 
> Not quite right. 
> 
> Uncle Regulus was unpacking the groceries, mother was uncorking a bottle of red wine. 
> 
> “Finally, I feel like I’ve been calling you for hours. Come help.”
> 
> Lyra moved closer to the island, standing opposite Uncle Regulus. Her mother tutted at the mess before them to the side, to the cups and plates and knives and forks, all laid out, all drank and eaten from. 
> 
> “Whatever have you been up to? Did someone call over? Kingsley? Prewitt?”
> 
> This was it. The moment. Left or right. Up or down. 
> 
> Lyra shook her head. 
> 
> “No. No one called over. I had lunch and then played solitaire in my room.”
> 
> Lyra glanced to Lily from the corner of her eye, to see if her lie flew straight, but her mother was preoccupied with pulling the wine glasses down from the top shelf in the cabinet. 
> 
> But Uncle Regulus did look over. 
> 
> Uncle Regulus did catch her eye. 
> 
> Uncle Regulus held it, and smiled that small, infuriating smile. 
> 
> Lily sighed, wine in hand. 
> 
> “Well, make sure you wash up after yourself next time, and you don’t need two of everything, darling. I’m sure one cup, one plate, and one knife and fork will do.” 
> 
> Lyra nodded. 
> 
> “I’ll make sure to clean up better next time.”


	5. Headstones On A Hillside

Lyra struck when Belenos had taken a sip of his steaming cup of tea, mouth full with sugar and cream and a dash of honey.

“Why are you here?”

He did not stumble at her question, not in the way Lyra wished he would. He did not choke, or splutter, or turn those alarming shades of red and blue and dappled lilac one typically did when suffocating. Her question wasn’t a noose, even if she had hoped it would be. It was only a question, perhaps even a touch naive, and Belenos took it in stride, deliberately swallowing before he took to answering, that midnight gaze never, not once, leaving her own.

“Your mother gave me a call and invited me over. She thought it would be better than leaving you all alone in this empty house where the big bad wolf could come a knocking.”

There was no wolf but the shadow of one in Belenos’s grin. Neither was Lyra an innocent piglet, plump and ready for crop, sweet apple pressed in her mouth, waiting for her straw house to be blown down around her pricked ears.

Lyra did not drink her own tea as she sat at the kitchen isle before a spread of cakes and sandwiches. Their own little tea party, where the real dessert was not in any mug or plate or bowl to be found.

“When did she call?”

Belenos took another sip, breath whistling as he blew, a flash of heat at the back of her calf, speaking over the gilt rim of Dorea Potter nee Black’s fine china cup.

“This morning.”

Lyra slipped into a smile like another girl would slip into silk.

“That’s funny.”

She chuckled, somewhat croaky, faintly husky, it had been weeks since she had last laughed. One of Belenos’s eyebrows, arched things as they were, cocked high on his Byronic face, his own cheeks dimpled in barely restrained delight.

“And why is that funny, Lyra?”

She plucked up the little silver spoon beside her cup, stirred her tea, and still did not drink. Around it went, her little silver spoon, making amber ripples swell. This little tea party was about satisfying another type of hunger.

“Mother doesn’t have a phone. She doesn’t like them. She says the radio waves mess with her magic. She only uses the floo or Patronus.”

The grin over the teacup bowed jagged, a little crooked, the shadow of a wolf coming into light, reaping bite and kick, and here Lyra realized the game they were playing.

After all, lying _is_ a game. The loser is simply the one caught out in the cold.

“Perhaps she borrowed Reg’s?”

Lyra nodded.

“Perhaps… if she had been up this morning at all. She only awoke at two in the afternoon. You got here by four, so even if she rang as soon as she woke up, unlikely seen as she came straight to the kitchens looking for Miss Fig, where I was, then you got here, from wherever you were, in record timing. Even if you apparated, it would take you an hour alone to walk through the woods where the wards are. So either mother did, somehow, without my notice, ring you, and you were lurking on the edges of our property before then, or she didn’t ring you at all.”

The silver spoon clacked as she put it down on the saucer.

There was a jump in Belenos’s cheek.

It seemed Uncle Regulus had not lied. Maybe this Belenos truly was a little bit like her, where sound and touch sometimes, blissfully, _horrifically,_ fused into one writhing mass of sensation.

“But Uncle Regulus has a phone. Uncle Regulus was on it this morning. Uncle Regulus drove mother into town, leaving me in this big empty house for a wolf to come a knocking.”

The cup unhurriedly lowered, the last sip stolen, a tick-tak as china kissed china, a fuzzy feeling to her fingertips. With his hands now empty, Belenos instead folded them into each other, stapled over the kitchen counter. Belenos didn’t deny it. He didn’t even try to.

He, perhaps, was not as good as Uncle Regulus at pretending he wore wool instead of fur.

Maybe he saw no need to.

“You’re a keen little thing, aren’t you? As sharp as a knives edge, I’d bet. As deadly as one too… Given the chance. Would you like that, Lyra? A chance?”

It was one of those questions that wasn’t really a question at all. James had loved those. _Lyra, did you break the vase? Lyra, have you seen Miss Fig’s house keys? Lyra, did you put a dead rat on your mother’s pillow?_ The answer was always yes, and Lyra always said no. It was part of the game Sirius told her to stop playing so much. The game that made her mother cry. Perhaps even the game that made Lily drink so much now that they were the only ones left to play, and no Sirius or James to buffer.

Lily didn’t get the rules. It made her angry. Hurt. Confused. Desperate. 

Sometimes, lately, Lyra wondered if her mother didn’t wish it weren’t her down in those graves, and not Sirius or James. Possibly, it would have been for the best.

For all of them.

Lyra pushed her tea away without ever taking a drink.

“Why are you here?”

Belenos hit back just as swiftly.

“Why did you let me in?”

Lyra mulled the word around her mouth, rinsed it around her tongue before she spoke it. It tasted sweet and tart, like she imagined her mother’s wine to taste, with only a hint of morning-come regret.

“Curiosity, I suppose. You don't get many Blacks around these parts.”

His fingers unfurled like the wings of a butterfly, paper thin and delicate, pale in the way a musician’s hands tended to be pale. Lyra spied a callus on his thumb, a stretch of thickened skin, likely formed from plucking harp strings over the years.

She tried to imagine Belenos with a harp in his lap.

All she could picture was a burning blue jay nest.

He was careful not to make any unwanted noise, no taps or creaks or tuts and tats.

He understood.

“Then let’s say I was curious too.”

Her head slanted to the side. 

“Only now? Not sixteen years ago? Or eight? Or five? There’s only one thing that has changed.”

She didn’t have to say anymore. They both know what that _thing_ is.

Two headstones on a hillside.

Belenos mirrored her movement, choosing his own words as if they were vintage whiskey.

“I’ve been… Indisposed until very recently. Even if I were not, I doubt good ol’ Sirius would have let me through the wards let alone the front door.”

He borrowed closer, leaning over the table splitting them apart, grinning, voice falling low.

“He didn’t like me much.”

The wink, Lyra thought, was implied. A secret just between them, partially a joke, achingly real. As if Belenos, unbearably, knew that despite the love Sirius had for Lyra, he didn’t much like her either, that Belenos too, once, stood in her little red boots. His voice was deep-rooted and opulent, largo in rhapsody from a fortepiano, a woodland in dusk, and Lyra could feel it as fire, flips and licks and laps at the tender tops of her skin.

She looked away, down to her still full teacup.

“I’m beginning to understand Sirius didn’t like many people.”

From the corner of her eye she saw Belenos wave his hand flippantly, as if he caught a scent of something foul.

“No one that was any sort of fun, at any rate. You’re fun, aren’t you, Lyra?”

_Aren’t you, Lyra?_

**_Aren’t you?_ **

Another question-not-question, because, she was sure, this Belenos said _fun_ but meant something she couldn’t quite grasp right then and there. In its place she answered with a no-answer.

“Mother says I’m maddening.”

He laughed at that. A laugh that was raucous, and rough, almost a cackle, the wail of sand being blackened to glass by lightning. A maddening noise for a maddening girl.

“Oh, she would, wouldn’t she?”

He tilted further still, closer, keener, and Lyra could smell cloves, and something sweetly sick like warmed syrup.

She had always loved treacle tarts.

“I’ll tell you a little secret about your mother.”

She blinked up at him. This time he did wink. 

“Lily Evans is like a vampire. All parents are, really. She’s the type of person who can’t stand her own reflection. All you have to do is hold the mirror up. Next time she calls you maddening, ask her about her little dalliance with a certain Severus Snape. Ask her if that wasn’t just a little bit mad too. That will shush her right up.”

He slunk back into his seat, nothing more to give, but Lyra took what he had offered, stole it greedily and stuffed it somewhere deep in her mind for the day that grew dark. 

Then Belenos made his first decisive sound.

He reached for one of the many plates they had set up in silence, took hold of a little dish with a strawberry cream cake on it, stroked the fine china passed down from their shared ancestor, and then, slowly, slid it over the marble top, the echo screeching like a barn owl.

It scratched the insides of her rib cage.

“Now why don’t we have a bite to eat?”

Lyra stared at the cake, so pretty, sliced and squared and drizzled in syrup, much more than a simple pastry, an unspoken offer, a fun that was just out of reach, unnameable, unknown.

Lyra ignored the spoon.

She picked it up with her own fingers.

She took a bite.

Licked the messy cream from her top lip.

When she smiled, her teeth were red with strawberry sauce.

They spent the rest of the evening in her room. Lyra sat at her desk by her window, where she normally took her lessons, Belenos buzzing about her curtains and clothes like an angry, tall hornet, putting his sticky digits all over her things, tinting her room with his fingerprints. Lyra let him go about his buzzing-business, she didn't interrupt once, wondering if her mother would see him there, in the marks he would leave, in his sticky fingers, see a stranger where she could not see her daughter. 

Until, that is, he came upon her closet. 

He had the double doors open, floor spilled with black boxes and black ribbon, black tissue paper, and little-big red boots. He spent his time counting them, one to fourteen, before he glanced over his broad shoulder, down her crossed legs, to her fifteenth battered boots.

He grinned.

“I see you haven’t found the sixteenth yet.”

Lyra scowled over at him.

“How could I? Sirius died before my birthday.”

He hummed and spun his attention to her, the whirr in the air feeling like little kisses behind her fingernails.

“And Sirius _told_ you they were from him?”

Lyra didn’t remember being given her first pair for her first birthday, a pair that were, now, no larger than half her palm. Same in style, same in shade, only shrunk as if they were pits in a peach. Neither did she remember when or how it turned into a game, hiding her boots in lovely black boxes, hunting for them through the wood’s outback.

Her first type of hunt, in truth. 

She did, however, remember eleven of the pairs, and by then it was set, a game, a yearly ritual.

She remembered coming in from the woods, early in the morning, speckled with dew, dragonflies fluttering about her hair, dressed in her nighty with grass stained knees, new red boots on her feet, silk box caught in her arm like a trophy kill.

She remembered the way Sirius, for the starkest of seconds, would look at her feet, look and look and look-

And look _away_.

He never said anything.

She never said thank you.

It was just a given.

As with many traditions, one forgot to ask _why_ as the years rolled by.

“Who else could they be from?”

Belenos was fast when he wanted to be, Lyra discovered, for he was suddenly on her bedspread, peering around her bedpost, grinning, hand a blunt white smear against the chestnut lacquer.

“Who else indeed?”

There was a joke there she wasn’t quite getting.

He balanced his chin on the bottom of her bed frame, until his face was all she could see over the makeshift ledge, and, Lyra thought, he looked like a fairy.

Not those bleached things from mother’s books, the ones with gossamer wings and kindly glittered kisses. _No_. The old ones, from the old tales, where they had raven bone crowns, and bark for armour, and babies blood for wine, the kind of faeries that stole pretty brides and rode in wild hunts and struck deals at dusk and dawn over a mound of mushrooms and moss. 

“Maybe you should go looking in Sirius’s study. You might not find the sixteenth there, that's not _my_ game to play, but you could find something else red.”

Lyra’s response was nothing less than a knee jerk reaction.

“I’m not allowed in Sirius's study.”

It was one of the only real rules she had growing up.

She was not, ever, to go into Sirius’s study.

Amusingly, it was the only thing her three parents had agreed on when it came to Lyra.

_She was not, ever, to go into Sirius’s study._

Belenos chuckled that rich rasp, like wind blowing through the bare branches of the wych elm out back, deep in the heart of the woods.

“Who’s going to stop you now?”

_Who indeed?_

Lily? If only she would look up from her wine glass or tumbler.

Miss Fig? From wherever she had disappeared to.

Sirius and James? The maggots would already be busy at work devouring their lips.

Who else did she have?

No one… _No one._

There was an unexpected beep, a blitz of prickling in her belly, and Belenos stood from the bed, only to dip his hand into the pocket of his black coat. He pulled free a phone, scanned the screen, slipped it back home at his hip.

“I believe it is time for me to go.”

Lyra’s hands clenched on the seat edge of her chair.

“Will you be back?”

She didn’t say she was lonely.

That too, conceivably, was a given. 

Belenos looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite place, as if she had asked a very silly question, or whether she was wandering if the sun would rise tomorrow, of whether a starving man was hungry.

“Of course I will. Who knows, I might bring Narcissus next time. Or perhaps Walburga. She’s just itching to meet you.”

He grinned and he shrugged.

“Or perhaps I will keep you all to myself for a little while longer.”

Lyra frowned darkly.

“Who says it is not me keeping you?”

The wych elm shook, and Belenos laughed.

“I knew you would be fun.”

And that was it.

With a crack, a pop, and a burst of sunset-magic, Belenos was gone.

He shouldn’t have been able to apparate. Yet, he had.

Someone must have changed the wards.

The only thing left was a black scarf, draped across her bed frame, an inky black swath that smelled of cloves and sticky honey the hornet had stolen from the bees. Lyra took her time going to it, plucked it up gingerly, fingers thumbing the soft wool.

She pleated it snugly, shoved it deep underneath her pillows, where dreams and secrets tend to hide.

“Lyra!”

Lyra jerked her head over the second-floor landing banister. Her mother stared up from the foyer, still in that hideously brilliant scarf, arms ladened with brown paper bags, rosy cheeked and looking carefree.

“Well, are you going to come down and help me unpack all these groceries?”

As if to make her point, as if it was Lyra who couldn't see lately, Lily waggled the bags in her arms.

“I’ll be right down.”

Lyra, naturally, was not right down. She only came down after venturing to her mother’s room, the one she had shared with her husband and lover, to her little side table, the one that had belonged to James and Sirius, where, in the bottom draw, she found the iron key to the study.

The key sank to the bottom of her skirt’s pocket. The draw closed with a thud. 

Lyra didn't plan on going in there. It was something bad. Something wrong. One of her last promises to a dead father not to go into his study. She didn't plan on going in there, but just in case...

_Just in case._

__

Pushing open the swing door to the kitchen, Lyra entered into the scene of domesticity much like a spider descended from its web. Carefully, unsure of the rocky terrain that would greet it. Uncle Regulus and Lily were unpacking the groceries on the kitchen island.

No.

Not quite right.

Uncle Regulus was unpacking the groceries, mother was uncorking a bottle of red wine.

“Finally, I feel like I’ve been calling you for hours. Come help.”

Lyra moved closer to the island, standing opposite Uncle Regulus as if the kitchen tile was a chessboard. If so, what was he? King? Knight? Rook? Worse still, what was she? 

_A pawn._

Nothing more.

Yet... Deadly if she made it to the other side. 

Her mother tutted at the mess before them on the counter, to the cups and plates and knives and forks all laid out, all drank and eaten from.

There was still a smudge of strawberry sauce on one of the dishes.

“Whatever have you been up to? Did someone call over? Kingsley? Prewitt?”

This was it. The moment. Left or right. Up or down.

Lyra shook her head.

“No. No one called over. I had lunch and then played solitaire in my room.”

Lyra glanced to Lily from the corner of her eye, to see if her lie flew straight, but her mother was preoccupied with pulling the wine glasses down from the top shelf in the cabinet as she left the wine to breathe.

It wouldn't have long to do so. 

But Uncle Regulus _did_ look over.

Uncle Regulus _did_ catch her eye.

Uncle Regulus held it, and smiled that small, infuriating smile.

Lily sighed, wine now in hand.

Lyra told you so. 

“Well, make sure you wash up after yourself next time, and you don’t need two of everything, darling. I’m sure one cup, one plate, and one knife and fork will do. And don’t eat so much dessert, either. You’ll ruin your appetite for dinner.”

Lyra nodded.

“I’ll make sure to clean up better next time.”

And then, just to be safe, Lyra switched topics to something mundane, something normal, something a daughter would commonly ask her mother.

“What are we having for dinner?”

Lily shrugged around a gulp of red.

“No idea, sweetheart. Why don’t you go ask Miss’s Fig?”

Lyra faltered.

“I would but she’s not here.”

The wine glass paused halfway to her mother’s painted mouth, now ruined on glass.

Had she come in with smeared lipstick?

Lyra thought she had.

She, too, doubted it was from an ice cream cone.

Was Uncle Regulus's lips naturally that pink?

“What do you mean Miss’s Figs not here?”

What else could Lyra possibly mean?

“She didn’t come today.”

Lily didn’t take another sip, not right then, instead lowering her one legged glass back to the kitchen island, where the rim clinked on marble and the sound nipped at Lyra’s nose as if she were a puppy that had pissed on the carpet.

“Really? This truly isn’t like her… I hope she’s alright… Maybe I could-“

But Uncle Regulus was cutting through the worry, sneaking through the concern, all charm and smiles and moonbeam eyes.

Lily never stood a chance.

“I can cook a little.”

The prospect of a home cooked meal by nimble hands obviously made her mother thirsty in the way grown-ups _could_ be thirsty.

In a way Lyra was beginning to understand she could be thirsty too.

“You can? Do you hear that, Lyra?”

Anew, Lily lifted her glass in salute.

“Three cheers for Uncle Regulus!”

Lily was the only one to cheer.

Lyra stayed mute.

Flinty.

Lily didn’t see this. She hadn’t since Sirius and James had died. Perhaps even longer before then.

Lyra could cook.

Lyra had always been able to cook.

“I’m sure we would have starved to death otherwise. I cannot cook for the life of me. Positively terrible. You’re a lifesaver, Reg.”

The familiarity Lily drenched that word in, that precious breathless _Reg_ , bit in harder to Lyra’s nose.

Uncle Regulus grinned, not as sharply as Belenos had, not as toothy either, his smile was as smooth as spun sugar and black coffee.

And it burnt Lyra’s tongue.

“It’s my pleasure.”

He wasn’t looking at Lily.

He pressed over, across the island, two tubs from Florean Fortecue’s, blithely decorated in streaks of yellow and pink.

Ice cream.

“Lyra, can you take these down to the freezer, please? I don’t think there’s any more room up here.”

For the ice cream or her?

_Both._

Lyra scowled.

“Use an extension charm. You are a wizard, aren’t you? Or just a little fuckin' dense?”

Her mother gagged on her wine.

_Good._

“Lyra! Language!”

Uncle Regulus merely chuckled, feeling like butter mint cold on Lyra's lips.

Lyra wanted to strangle him then. Wanted it so bad her hands clenched at her side, sore with want. She wanted to see what he looked like alarming red, or blue, or dappled lilac.

_Sometimes, Lyra, you have to do something bad before you do something worse._

She pinched her thigh below the table, out of sight.

It did nothing.

Uncle Regulus’s smile grew.

“Cream is finicky. It tends to… _Spoil,_ if not treated delicately, and curdle after being left under _stifling_ magic for too long. Best not to tempt fate, I think. It would be an awful shame if these went sour. One lemongrass, one rosewater … Did I get it right?”

The bastard _had_ gotten it right. They _were_ her favourite flavours, Lyra had forever had a fondness for the delicate. The exact same ones James brought home after he had been on an Auror mission for weeks on end.

Only, this wasn’t James.

James wasn’t coming home.

Lyra didn’t give her Uncle an inch.

“I prefer the swirled kind.”

Lily huffed and slapped her glass down on the counter so hard the spindly stem nearly broke.

She wished it had.

She wished it had been someone’s neck.

She wished-

“You can make the swirl yourself. You’re sixteen now, Lyra, not six. Now say thank you, and take them down to the freezer. Honestly…”

In the end, Lyra took the tubs of ice cream, she balanced one under each arm, the chill gnawing into supple flesh through the sleeves of her dreary shirt, and she turned her back on the kitchen, to the curved door around the side, to the basement.

But she didn’t say thank you.

“I sometimes wonder if that girl was raised in a barn or a bog. I swear I taught her better than that. I-“

Lily’s voice trailed her into the dark.

Lyra’s echoed only in her own head.

_You didn’t raise me at all. You left that to the au pairs, the countless ones you hired and fired, to Miss Fig and Sirius and James, and lately all you want to nurse is another glass of bloody wine._

__

_No One's P.O.V_

Blackness, silence, _cold_. A door opened at the top of the stairs. Lyra stood haloed in white, bare, light, silhouetted against the kitchen behind her. She stepped down meticulously, knowing just what weak steps to miss. They were old stairs, old and rickety, and shot rotten in places.

Potter Manor basement was the only dark place to be found in a hundred miles.

Lyra Potter wasn’t afraid of the dark.

Only what she knew could hide in there. 

Kind _knows_ kind. 

When she reached the bottom, she set the tubs down at her feet, patted instinctively in the dark, wiggled her wand free from its house at her belt loop, and with a whisper and a flash, the tip flared to life.

“Lumos.”

The spell didn’t do much, not down in the basement, but it did give enough little light to find the chain swinging at her ear, where Lyra grasped it and pulled, and set the bare bulb above her head alight too.

Her muggleborn mother, from comforts and memories of her own childhood, had insisted lights be placed throughout the whole house. James had only gotten around to placing a few down there, in the basement, before he had given up.

Threading her wand back through her belt loop, above a stolen key, Lyra plucked up the tubs of ice cream, her favourite flavours, and set down the warren of unfinished rooms and abandoned items stacked in piles that made Potter Manor cellar a maze.

The spotted bulbs, stretched far too thin, dipped her in darkness, then bathed her in light, then dipped her dark all over again. The dust down there was thick, the kind to get lodged in a throat for weeks, the grime of her feigned ancestor’s lives left to rot in the opaque.

There was Dorea’s old boudoir.

There was Charlus’s wicker smoking chair.

There was Fleamont’s peacock tapestry.

There was Hardwin’s once upon a time bed.

So many things left to be forgotten down in the belly of a home.

That's what a cellar was. 

The place where things, people, memories were digested. 

_Creak._

Lyra turned around, ears pricked as something stabbed at the back of her neck. She was not scared. Lyra was not a girl who became scared often. However, she was vigilant. This basement was damp and dark and cluttered, the perfect breeding ground for gnomes, and gnomes, Lyra knew personally, could snap at an ankle rather harshly.

The heaped boxes, the stacked crates, the upended chunks of furniture dumped down there decades ago all form nooks and crannies and inlaid roads. Perfect places to hide, if you were so inclined.

Nevertheless, finding nothing, Lyra went back to her journey, approaching the aged, muggle freezer stashed at the very back of the basement, another muggle luxury Lily had insisted she could not live without. It hummed quietly to itself along the far wall.

The sensation of the sound made Lyra feel cold long before she opened the lid.

It groaned as it was lifted.

_Creak._

Lyra’s head snapped around, breath catching, holding, stony still, scrutinizing the darkness, listening, touching sound and silence. Lyra knew how to hunt, how to chase, how to search.

_Nothing._

Nevertheless, she kept her gaze on the room behind her, the catacomb of Potters, she knew how gnomes liked attacking in packs from the back, and, blindly, she dumped the ice cream into the old freezer.

Done with her task, she let go of the lid, let the hinges close on their own, already walking for the stairs out.

There was a brief moment when the freezer was illuminated, just before the lid shut on its free-fall, when the dust speckled bulb shined through Lyra’s retreating shadow.

A pale blue eye, chilled awake evermore, gaped out from among the frozen foods, the two tubs of turned-over ice cream, between the store-bought cherry pie and the neglected leftover soups.

Miss Fig was bedded in the freezer, her icy tomb, mouth open in a silent scream, kindly face brushed with frost, a large slash of her long grey hair stolen, nothing but a jagged cut on scalp.

The lid clanked shut.

Lyra ascended the stairs.

The door closed.

Blackness, silence, _cold._


	6. Moth Wings

The dissonance of carving and chomping, the tinkle of delicate silverware on delicate china laid out between delicate people, each in their own way. The lengthy dinner table in the dining room dotted with pressed linen and silver specks, crystal and flowers, ignited amber by candlelight.

Lily sat at the head of the glossy table, Uncle Regulus at her right, Lyra at her left, a warrior and cleric respectively if Lily had been a queen and this a coronation banquet. Her court, however, was dismally small. Seven high-backed chairs rising from the other side of the table, vacant.

Erlkönig by Schubert played dreamily in the milieu. The opening an unyielding triplet figure on the piano forming an overpowering sense of haste and dread that, it seemed, only Lyra could hear.

It was not a surprise, really, Lyra thought. Her mother never understood the story _behind_ the music, some people couldn't peer past the shallows, for every stave and clef had a fairy-tale, and Erlkönig was a fable of a fast ride through the dark night as a hopeless father carried his terrified child on horseback to escape the faerie Earl King the child could sense chasing him.

Or perhaps it was Uncle Regulus who couldn’t see the Erlkönig.

He _had_ chosen the piece, nevertheless.

Worst yet, perhaps he _could_ see it. Perhaps there was meaning to be found hiding in meanings. 

The wistful, subdued music shattered with Lily’s contented sigh.

“Oh, Reg, the coq au vin is exquisite!”

Uncle Regulus skewered the chicken trussed up in a wine, lardons, and mushroom consommé. Silver knife gleaming in the candlelight.

“I’m happy to have made myself useful.”

There was mother’s smile, the one Lyra knew was coming, as marvellous and beautiful and desperate as the music still playing.

“It’s delicious! Truly. Je ne sais quoi, wouldn’t you say, Lyra?”

Lyra did not comment on the food, or Uncle Regulus’s culinary skills, _it tasted like chicken and mushrooms,_ what more was there to say? She did, however, answer, unmistakable accent, clear diction, just as James had taught her.

Perfectly French, perfectly poised, perfectly _bored._

“Tu parles français comme une vache espagnole.”

Her mother’s French dictionary only went so far, which was to say, not far enough for the dreadful accent Lily put on when dabbling in the continental language of love. Maybe she understood the word Spanish Lyra guessed, and maybe she understood like, and a, and even French, but Lily could not string it together. For, if Lily _had_ understood Lyra saying _you speak French like a Spanish cow,_ she might not have grinned so widely.

“You can say that again!”

Uncle Regulus coughed, and even this was somehow elegant, into his folded napkin. It sounded like a chuckle to Lyra, felt like one too, a trilling in her toes as if the ground beneath was purring, but to her mother it might have sounded like sympathy because now her grin was solely intended for him. Warmth stolen. 

Lyra did not take another bite, using her own glittering fork to push around her food, untouched.

“This is a real treat for us, Reg. Sometimes I think Miss’s Fig got her Mastery in chicken soup.”

Her mother took another bite, almost obscenely letting it linger on the cusp of her painted lips, still smeared, still ruined, moaning as it slipped in. She spoke with her mouth full.

“You, on the other hand, are clearly a man of hidden talents. You must tell me where you learned to cook.”

Uncle Regulus’s fork hung over a breast of chicken, hovering, waiting to drop.

“I was lucky enough to have an au pair as a child who was French. Madame Maillard, strict woman, but she ran a superb house. I tried to soak up everything I possibly could as a child, her talents being one of those many things.”

 _Many things._ Lyra idly wandered what those many things were. Sewing? He hand the deft fingers for it. Potions? The way he wielded his utensils showed, maybe, a predilection to the meticulous. Quidditch? Not in those clothes. 

She bet that was a rather sore contention between him and Sirius growing up. 

Possibly a titbit to store for later use. 

Lily tipped her wine glass in his direction, but her gaze, those bright, soft eyes, cut a sharp line to Lyra.

“Sounds like a childhood well-spent! We had au pairs too… Until Lyra ran them off. They could never handle her for more than three months. Sometimes, I wish they had taken me with them!”

Lily laughed, fast and imply.

She was the only one to.

Uncle Regulus’s knife slipped into the breast in a smooth, keen stroke.

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?”

There was something there, skulking in those words, in the Donatello carven face of her Uncle, something… _Dark_. Dark _and_ dangerous. Even Lily halted, bite hovering, caught in the air, as if she caught sight of Medusa skulking in the corner of the room. Eyes could be that way, Lyra believed. Petrifying. 

Nevertheless, it was gone before it was ever truly there, that dark and dangerous glimmer, and Uncle Regulus was back to grinning sugar-spun smiles, voice slick and warm like black coffee.

Decadent, debauched, and distractingly disarming.

“Sirius was just the same, I mean. It made our poor mother grey long before her time. Of course, that all changed… _After._ ”

It was a fishhook in the marine, squirming bate in the black.

Lyra bit.

“After?”

Uncle Regulus nodded, stiffly, crisply, as practised and perfect as his three-piece suit.

“After little Lyra went missing.”

Lyra frowned.

“I don’t get it… I’m not missing.”

Again, she forgot there was a time before herself, a world without her in it, a place she had not walked. Uncle Regulus’s grin was prettier than the crystal ware, as angular as it too.

"Not right now, no. Little Lyra... Mine and your father's youngest sister. Your namesake, perhaps? You certainly know all about her. How could you not? Such a tragedy. There one minute, nothing but a babe at breast, vanished the next. Now that I think about it... Sirius left home not long after, barely three days if I'm not mistaken."

He exhaled forlornly, a breath that remained between them, a rush of pepper and pleasure.

"How long ago was that now? It must be... Yes, nearly twenty-five years since Sirius ran away with nothing but a rucksack, and a stolen trinket. I am still surprised, out of all our heirlooms, Sirius chose to take Grandfathers antique Time-turner. You would think-"

_Slap!_

Lily clapped, smiling a thin point, frail and brittle as an autumn leaf.

“Oh this chicken really is delightful Reg! you must give me the recipe. I will have-“

“What's a Time-turner? What-“

“I must have Miss Fig try her hand at it, you see! This is-“

“Mother, who’s Lyra? What’s Regulus-“

“Let’s change this music, yes? This track is giving me a terrible headache! Oh, and tell me more of this charming Madame Maillard? Is she still working, do you know?”

Lily snubbed her questions, pretended she, this Lyra, was not sitting there, a ghost in her own home, and all too soon she fell silent as her mother flapped her wand, changing the music thrumming in the air into some nauseous jive that came ten-to-a-dozen.

Lyra was not going to get any answers. Not here. Not from her mother. Not tonight.

Uncle Regulus was a poor fisherman, or somehow the best kind, Lyra wasn't sure which.

He didn’t even try to reel her in.

He cut the line, let the hook sink, grinned at her mother, and moved on right along.

“She used to say that, in her opinion, there was nothing a man could master that a woman could not make.”

Lyra snorted.

“I don’t get that, either.”

A moonbeam eye winked at her over a glass of chardonnay.

“It sounds better in French. Speaking of which, Lily, your accent is lovely.”

Lily fluffed her copper curls, pleased, perhaps, the focus was back solely and squarely on her.

“Thank you, Reg! One of the perks of a first-class education. That and a ticket to oblivion behind a white picket fence. First-class, of course.”

_Oblivion._

The word caught in Lyra’s throat. Lodged itself home there. Wept and festered like an open sore.

Is that truly what Lily thought, Lyra pondered?

Their home, their memories, the nest Sirius and James and Lily built, the chick, even if it _was_ a cannibalistic cuckoo, they had raised… _Oblivion_. A long, drawn out death… Oblivion…

**_Oblivion._ **

Lyra’s hand tightened around the knife handle, knuckles blanching silvery pale.

_Sometimes, Lyra, you have to do something bad before you do something worse._

Uncle Regulus wagged a playful finger in her mother’s direction.

“You’re being too hard on yourself again. Remember what we talked about earlier? On the way home? In the car?”

It was all secrets. Secret smiles, and secret sonnets, and secret smeared lipstick, and secret little Lyra’s.

_Sometimes, Lyra, you have to do something bad before you do something worse._

Lily blushed handsomely, a pink flush Lyra had not seen her mother wear for many years, and she sipped her wine, and Lyra could see her mother hiding a small dimple behind her half-drained glass.

The same kind of smile she used to give James on Christmas morning, when he asked if Santa Claws, he could never get the muggle name right, was going to get some alone time with Mrs Claws.

_Sometimes, Lyra, you **have** to do something bad before you do something worse. _

Uncle Regulus glanced her way.

Uncle Regulus grinned.

“I was telling your mother I think it might be a time for a change, time for her to start looking at things differently.”

He didn’t let Lyra respond, no one let her talk, no one _listened,_ turning all too swiftly back to her blushing mother.

_Sometimes, Lyra, you have to do something bad before you do something **worse.**_

“All kinds of things. Remember, Lily?”

Her mother was practically breathless. Faux-pa-coy.

“Yes, Reg. I remember…”

Her mother, and Uncle Regulus, the latter gave a burning sense of satisfaction splintering down Lyra's spine, startled at the mirror above the mantle shattering to silver-rain. As the vase on the windowsill followed suit, a cacophony of wrecking glass, as Lyra’s magic lashed out. It was not the only part of her to whip about. Her tongue did too. Forked and seeping poison.

“When you kissed my mother in the back of your convertible, I wonder who you tasted, Uncle. James or Sirius? Perhaps a bit of both? Or has my mother’s drowning sorrows burnt away all other tastes but cheap fuckin’ wine and dishwater whiskey? If you want my mother to remember anything, you should ask her to write it down. Obviously she has forgotten she was happily married less than four weeks ago.”

Lily’s glare was murderous, sizzling against Lyra’s cheek, her blush altogether a _different_ meaning of red.

Lyra discovered she didn’t rightly care.

She was, finally, being _seen._

“In Victorian times you would have been married off by now. Sold to the highest bidder.”

Impossible green crashed against starlight grey.

Lyra grinned madly, she was, in the end, a maddening girl, wasn’t she?

_Sometimes, Lyra, you have to do something **bad** before you do something worse. _

“Really, mother? Who do you think it would have been? A Weasley boy? A Diggory? No… There was generally an age difference between a husband and wife back then, wasn’t there? What about… _Severus Snape?_ Keep it in the family, right? You appear to like that a little bit too much.”

The name landed like a physical blow, Lily dropping back into her high-backed throne as if she were a puppet with her strings cut. Her mouth opened. Her mouth closed.

But it was Uncle Regulus’s voice that pierced the bubbled silence.

“My goodness, Lyra. That’s quite an appetite you have.”

Lyra’s head snapped around. Confused, for the moment. She had forgotten he was there at all, this dark spectator. Confused even more by what he meant. Appetite? For trouble? Perhaps. For hurt? Definitely. For bad things? Oh, _yes._

Yet, he was not looking at her.

He was not looking at mother with her strings cut.

He was looking down and over to her plate.

Lyra followed his gaze.

Uncle Regulus was right. The plate was practically licked clean. Nothing left but pecked bones.

She didn’t remember lifting her fork once.

“I… I guess I didn’t realise how hungry I was.”

There it was, that damned, wicked smile.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it. Can I get you anything else? Maybe some ice cream?”

Lyra had the distinct impression he was not talking about her dinner.

Lyra dropped her knife and fork, uncaring of how or where they landed, hands sinking below the linen to wring knots into her skirts.

“No.”

Lily found her voice, but it was shaky, fragile, precarious, moth-wing powdery.

“You mean no _thank you.”_

Her mother was on default, and Lyra on the defensive, and these last few months had been nothing short of a disaster.

Her hands tangled tighter into her skirt.

“I mean no thank you.”

Lily’s hands strayed to her wine glass but they didn’t seem strong enough to lift it, instead simply stumbling around the stem.

“Lyra, would you like to play something for us after dinner?”

Tighter, and tighter, and tighter.

“No.”

A warning.

“ _Lyra.”_

The stitching in the hem of her skirt ripped between Lyra’s fingers. A frayed slit up the side.

This is what it felt like coming apart at the seams.

The skirt fell from her grasp, fluttered to her knees. Lyra canted her head, smiled her most beguiling smile, dimpled and bright and achingly toothy.

“I mean no thank _you._ ”

Lily’s chair screeched as it was pushed back, as its inhabitant came to a slouched stand.

“Our loss, I imagine. In that case, I’m afraid I must excuse myself. I’m feeling… Very tired all of a sudden. Goodnight, Reg.”

Her mother didn’t say goodnight to Lyra, but she did take her wine glass before she left the room. Lyra only stood from her own seat when she couldn’t hear the clacking of her mother’s heels on the hardwood flooring, a set of four-fingered pinches on her ankle.

“I’ll clean up.”

It was only polite. It was _her_ mess. Her bitter, vicious mess.

Lyra may have won the argument, but she felt as if she had lost something more. 

She reached for her mother’s half eaten scraps, piling it on top of her own barren plate. Uncle Regulus stole the silverware before Lyra could snatch it.

“I’ll help.”

Lyra shook her head.

“That’s not necessary.”

Regulus chuckled.

"I insist."

The sound of running water calmed the aches and pains searing cigarette burns in Lyra’s chest. She stood at the sink, her back to the kitchen, on the counter to her left was a stack of dirty dishes. To her right, with barely enough room to leave Lyra able to lift her elbow without knocking him, was Uncle Regulus, dish towel at the ready.

Lyra didn’t know whether deciding to do the dishes the muggle way was her own brand of punishment or not. Neither did she know why Uncle Regulus hadn't complained as she took the dishes to the sink rather than to her wand. Miss’s Fig used to say that idle hands were the devil’s work. Lyra wasn’t too sure what that meant, but she didn’t want to grow horns and turn scarlet.

She was happy with her little red boots, not hooves.

Maybe it was too late for all that.

She washed the first plate and set it down on the counter between them. Regulus picked it up, dried it, sleeves rolled anew, and put it back down.

Lyra washed another plate and set it down. He picked it up, dried it, and put it back down.

She washed another, he dried another.

Neither spoke a word.

It became, strangely, a noticeable rhythm, without either seemingly aware of it, they perform this little morsel of household composition like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

And then they were finished.

_Done._

Lyra put the sponge down, and turned to Regulus.

“What do you want?”

He folded the towel methodically between his clever fingers.

“To be friends.”

Lyra veered away.

“We don’t need to be friends.”

She marched from the counter, from the lovely dishes all fixed and pristine, if only everything else could be so easy, away from Regulus, stopping by the door.

“We’re family.”

She knew he was smiling.

She couldn’t bare to look.

It was a free confession, a clandestine candle to keep aflame.

It was good, and wonderful, and kind.

And, somehow, someway, that made it a hundred times worse.

Lyra left Regulus there, alone.

Lyra’s hand reached through the dim night, to the frame of a door, where, quietly, she knocked in a bout of seven.

There was no answer.

She opened the door and stepped through.

Lily was splayed out on her bed belly down, still dressed for dinner, fast asleep. Her wine glass dangled perilously from an outstretched hand.

Lyra walked silently over, stared down hard at her mother.

On her bedside table, arranged on a silver tray, was all her potions. Numbing brew, sleeping draught, nightmare decreasing poultice.

This was her tray of anguish.

Guilt clawed up Lyra’s throat. It burrowed downwards too, to the very bottom of her bowels, until the tips of her fingers and the ends of her toes felt cold.

Lyra had her blue jay nests.

Her mother had the bottom of a champagne bottle.

Both were hurting.

Together they didn’t know what else to do but what they had found. 

The Greeks had it right, Lyra thought. Ironic comedy was never far from tragedy.

Lyra gently removed the glass from her mother’s slack fingers.

Sympathy came easy at night for Lyra. Less so when the sun rose.

Perhaps in the morning the anger and the stinging invisibility, and all those little hurts would be back and bloodshot.

That night, however, Lyra was only tired.

That night, Lyra stood alone at the kitchen sink, washing one last glass.

Lyra spent the next few days traipsing Potter Manor woods from dusk till dawn. It was her home. Much more so than the brick and grout of a house. She was born in a birch tree, James had joked. She had a dog, a stag, and a flower as parents. If anyone ever belonged to the woods it was our Lyra, he would finish. _Had_ finished. 

So, she drifted home, and she licked her wounds, and she looked, and looked, and looked for the sixteenth pair of boots.

She came home empty handed each time.

Summer was drawing to an end.

Soon, Miss’s McGonagall would be calling for lessons.

It was on the fourth evening it happened, after Lyra had spent the day between underbrush and scrub, weaving willow reads into garlands she then sent sailing down a pond.

Lyra opened the front door at sunset. She walked in.

She heard laughter.

Laughter and _music._

As instinctively as Lyra knew the woods she had just left, she knew that C major sharp.

She had tuned it herself.

She went to her den, a step ahead of another, slowly, sluggishly, as if she was wading through fog and mist and something acidic.

She stood by the open doorway.

Regulus and Lily sat on _her_ chair, pushed up cosily to _her_ grand piano, playing off-key and laughing between bars.

It was clunky, and it was awkward, and it gutted like nothing else ever would.

Sirius had once sat where Regulus did.

James had bought that brass-peddled piano for _Lyra._

Sirius had taught her Schubert and Beethoven, Wolfgang and Chopin. Languages she understood, languages she could speak, languages Sirius could listen and understand after her diagnosis.

They had laughed at that piano.

They had cried at it too.

They had hit the wrong note, and the right note, and notes that screamed.

Lily spotted her at the doorway, giggling brilliantly.

“Lyra! Your Uncle is teaching me the piano! Isn’t it wonderful?”

Sirius had brushed those ebony keys tenderly.

Lyra had tapped at white.

They met in the middle, and they made music, and for only a little while there was someone who _saw_ Lyra.

Regulus winked from over his shoulder.

“Why don’t you come play with us, Lyra?”

Regulus was flushed, gleaming in the eye, thrilled and vibrant and-

Sirius-

Her piano-

She… She…

Lily was, somewhat, less enthusiastic.

“Yes, come and play.”

Lyra turned around and walked down the hall, straight to her room where she slammed the door.

She would never touch that piano again.

Sirius was no longer hiding in the notes.

Regulus and Lily had gone and sung over him.

_**Sometimes** , Lyra, you have to do something bad before you do something worse. _

Lyra made herself scarce in the following week. She only ever came in from the woods when the lights were off in the house, and she always left before they were switched on in the morning. She looked for the sixteenth pair of boots, she _had_ to, Lyra thought.

But she didn’t venture near the study; Lyra couldn’t quite bring herself to cross that one last line.

Yet, she did keep the key on her.

_Just in case._

The red boots would be the only thing she had left, now that the piano had been tainted.

_Who else but Sirius could have given them to her?_

Maybe he hid them weeks before her birthday.

Maybe, as a dying cat does, he knew something was coming and set the game ready.

Maybe-

The back door opened, Lily stepped out onto the terrace, carrying a racket, and dressed in tennis whites. She saw Lyra kicking pebbles by the treeline.

“Good morning, sleepyhead!”

Lyra had been up for hours, but she let it go.

The next pebble, however, did go sailing through the air.

“Reg cleared off the court yesterday so we’re going to walk on over and have a game. He says he’s never played before. Isn’t that funny? Purebloods just don’t understand what they’re missing. Good thing I’m around to show him, right?”

Lyra merely gazed at Lily, laughing-Lily, remembering how her fingers fumbled over the piano keys, scratching at Sirius’s face between the notes, spitting her own name there.

“At least I won’t be the one embarrassing myself this time.”

A beat.

“You don’t want to come, do you?”

There was no mistaking the stress drenched _don’t._

An order hiding as a query.

Regulus came strolling out the back door, and the world stopped spinning.

“I’m wearing a belt, but other than that everything fits perfectly!”

He had James’s Quidditch jersey on. Potter emblazoned across his back. He wore Sirius’s breeches, his boots and pads too, worn pale brown in places and streaks from cracked leather. Red and gold, gold and red, and-

_Utterly wrong._

Lily snickered.

“I gave him some of your father’s old things to wear. No sense in being wasteful.”

_Old things._

_No sense._

**_Wasteful._ **

Regulus playfully bumped shoulders with Lily as he strolled past, but he was grinning at _her._

“You ready… Lily?”

_You ready?_

Lyra was **ready.**

Lily gave Lyra a little wave as she too ambled away, over the green.

“Goodbye, darling! See you later.”

Lyra turned towards the house for the first time in over a week.

_Sometimes, Lyra, you have to do something bad before you **do** something worse. _

Lyra had a blue jay nest to burn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always thought Regulus was the type of person who could say one thing, one word, and mean several different things, most of them insulting, all of them equally true. I'm trying hard to get that nuanced angle of his right. I hope you all liked it!


	7. A Casket Full Of Caterpillars

Lyra was a force of nature, a bag of bone and blood and black bile, as she blitzed her way through the house. She knew where she was going. Her eyes were set. Fire in her belly. A key in hand.

The lock clicked open.

The handle groaned as it was turned.

The door creaked as it opened.

Little nudges across the fervid flesh splayed across her back. 

She felt the muscle ripple there, as if she were getting ready to sprout wings of thistle leaves but the rind was still too coarse to split. 

She paused at the threshold, red boots pressed at entry, a fleeting hiccup.

It was funny, bizarrely, how a place could exist in a way you never knew it could. That was Sirius’s Study. A place she knew was there, like one would know tomorrow was coming, but one she had never seen before as no one ever truly saw tomorrow before it became today.

It was masculine, dark leather, a field-stone fireplace, wood panelling painted that British racing red. Lyra took a single step inside, glanced around, and was struck with her father’s unmistakable smell.

Motor oil, the anise spiked cigarettes he snuck in the garage behind the car tarp, his dirty habit he had whined when she caught him when she was six, and the distinctive scent of _home._

Lyra drowned in the smell, sucked it deep in her lungs, and she held it there until it burned, until she had no other choice but to let it go. Even then, she swiftly stole another breath into herself. 

Slowly, she took another step in, and another, and another, until she was standing over what was clearly her father’s desk.

She tickled the raven quill he had left on the side, dried ink tip broken, cocked a brow at the curious necklace, a twist of metal and sand snagged under a locked glass cloche display, chuckled at the black-framed reading glasses Sirius would have denied ever needing, flicked the pad of her fingers over paperweights with etched dogs inside.

All black.

All Sirius.

She did, however, pick up the silver-framed photo, the only one he had on the desk at the far side, over a hoard of blank parchment, the top crossed with a single sentence.

_**In case of emergency, floo: Tonks Manor, Barafundle Bay, Pembrokeshire.** _

_Bit late for that, dad._

The photo was of herself and her father, taken long ago when she could still sit on his knee. They were both looking at the camera, both so impossibly alike and unalike, both clearly uncomfortable at the muggle practice they had been haggled into by Lily, both clearly pretending not to be.

Lyra did not trace her father’s face with her finger. Nothing so cliché. It was not him. He did not move. He did not breathe. This was an echo in ink. She merely studied it for a moment, having quite forgotten what he looked like without that streak of grey at his temple, and carefully returned it to its original position.

She spent longer sitting in his oaken chair, stroking red leather and brass tacks, chesterfield-chic. Lyra had lost track of time when she went to open the draws of the desk, not touching what was inside. Files mostly. Gringotts receipts and Ministry memos.

This was a respectful investigation, the word rifling did not apply.

She tried the bottom desk drawer last.

The lock catches.

She took hold of the iron key again, tries and triumphs.

The draw slid open.

Inside was a wand, not her fathers, something plain and short and-

 _Unmarked_ , if she was not mistaken. Interesting. But not red, not like what Belenos said she would find. Not red boots in a black box. 

No, the red was underneath.

Below the wand was a thick, dense bundle of letters, tied with string, swathed in red envelopes the same shade as her shoes. Beside those was a small, bent cardboard box, a flecked scarlet, battered by an age.

Lyra left the wand where she saw it, but she did take the box out, crinkled and bent as it was, and opened it.

Inside were wizarding photos, black and white and sepia.

She flicked through them, until the rolling grey became an October sky, stopping much by chance at one photo of four boys and two girls sitting on the steps of a sprawling townhouse, Gothic and gorgeous, a cherry tree, berries red, cut the corner in half, made the severe black-iron gate only a little less imposing. 

One boy, one of the oldest in his group, Lyra knew. Those eyes, a grey so dark they were almost black, were undeniable. He grinned just as keenly as he did now, Belenos, dimpled and wild, his hair as shockingly chaotic as her own smushed down underneath a beret. 

He waved at her from beneath the cherry tree. 

The girl next to him, surely only a year or two younger, was brown haired, sullen looking, arms crossed and scowling right at Lyra, braids tied off with a silk ribbon. The girl shook her head at Lyra, whipping her braids like horsetails, as if she was telling her _don't do it._

The boy next to her could be mistaken for a girl, for Lyra had on first glance, his hair wispy and soft, a pale blonde, flushed with a cherubs face. A taste for gold and glitter already present in the young boy by the gilt band around his thumb. 

He shyly smiled, snagged somewhere between his siblings dispositions. 

Beside them was Regulus, there could be no other, small for his age as Lyra had been, swinging his legs back and forth on the stone steps, one knee skinned, missing his front tooth, expression much too old for his tender age. 

He waggled his fingers at her. 

Sirius slouched at his left, speaking silently, voice trapped by paper and time, words Lyra would never hear, staring directly at her. He was young, so very young, a boy on the cusp of manhood, gangly and stretched getting ready to be filled like a Christmas pud, hair brushed shiny, face clean of smirk or stubble, in his arms a little girl only a few weeks old if that, swaddled in _red._

_Little Lyra._

Her name sake.

_Her namesake?_

The boys and girls, for they _were_ all boys and girls, children, the oldest, perhaps Sirius or Belenos, no older than sixteen, seventeen. They all wore the same apart from the babe, black short shirts, black berets, black shorts or skirts, black shoes, the summer uniforms of the privileged from days gone by. 

Lyra flipped the photo over. 

On the back, written in Sirius's script, oddly shaky in places, beautiful cursive, a line: ** _Belenos, Andromeda, Narcissus, Regulus, Sirius, Lyra. Summer Vacation ;1974. The last one._**

Lyra flipped to the next photo. 

It was smaller, this one, less condensed, half the cast missing. A Yuletide celebration, by the hawthorn wreath hung on the wall behind the trio squeezed into frame. 

Sirius was kicked back against the wall beside the prickled wreath, wearing a sweater and long slacks, face dark and solemn in a way Lyra had never seen before. 

Murderous, one might say. 

Haunted, Lyra would parry. 

The little boy, Regulus, sat on the floor on the other side of the wreath, baby now in his grasp, giggling down at a gummy smile. He said something to that babe, that Lyra, the photo swelling like a wave, and Sirius's head snapped around. 

Her father reached over. 

Took the child from straining hands. 

Held her close, safe, above a boy frowning and extending downy arms. 

Regulus caught an elbow. 

Sirius shook him off fiercely, stealing a step away, towards the edge of the photo. 

Sirius couldn’t have been older than seventeen here.

The year he ran away from home a measly month away.

The year Little Lyra went missing. 

Anew, Lyra flipped the photo.

**_Winter solstice. S & R & L ; 1974. Merlin help me. I'm sorry. I had to. There was no other way._ **

Merlin help him? With what? Why was he sorry? Sirius was never sorry, or so James would complain goodheartedly. 

The photo gave her no answers. It was dead in her palm, as dead as the raven quill. 

Lyra pitched the whole lot of photos back into the cardboard box, back in the grave they belonged, closed the lid with trembling hands, and pushed it far away from herself. 

Yet, her gaze did, like speck of dust caught in sunlight, float down to the drawer at her side. 

She dipped in. 

Pulled out the large packet of unopened letters. 

She thumbed the corner, read the line peaking out between the twine, and froze. 

The script was similar, not Sirius's fat consonants, but familiar, the same hand that wrote the numbers on the gift tags of her black boxes, one to fifteen but never a name from who it was from. She knew because the 1 was underscored crookedly, in a flourish of movement. 

The top letter was addressed to her, and not her at all. 

**_Lyra Black._ **

**_10, Potter Manor, Rother District, East Sussex._ **

Lyra did not tear into the string. She untied it gradually, hands quivering and quaking, slipping corded twine from envelope. The string fell to the desk. 

Like the photo's, she flipped and flicked. 

They were all addressed to her, and not her at all. 

Lyra slithered from the chesterfield chair, sank to her knees on shaggy rug, the pelt of some unsuspecting animal, and drew the letters with her. She scattered them out, a boneyard of paper and pen, and grabbed one at random.

 _This_ she did tear open.

_Happy, Birthday, little one. You’re five years old today, and that means you’re officially a big girl. I wish I could be at your party, but I’m currently far away in a place called Bulgaria. Someday I’ll bring you here, show you Sofia and Varna and Nessebar. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that, after being cooped up ~~in those dreadful thickets the Potters call a home…~~ You’ll enjoy the seaside. Take it as a birthday promise from your brother Reggie._

Brother?

Didn’t he mean Uncle?

Lyra ripped into the next one.

_Dear Lyra, I am writing this letter in the smallest inn room you have ever seen, not too far from the red cliffs of Petra. I wish you could see them for yourself, Lyra. One more place to put on our long, long list. Belenos is here too, and Narcissus and Andromeda, father and mother, uncles and aunts. They send their greeting, and Belenos says try not to get into too much trouble, just enough to keep Sirius on his toes. A Black, after all, needs to be kept spritely. I say, however, to cause as much trouble as you want, and then some more. Partner in crime, patiently waiting your response, brother Reggie._

_P.S; Mother says it won’t be long before you’re home now. The Wizengamot, surely, even with Albus Dumbledore on his side, cannot side with Sirius on this. Illegal use of a Time-turner has an Azkaban price-tag, even if they’re trying to pass you off as a Potter._

Another.

_My dearest Lyra, greetings from Heidelberg, that’s the one with the ruins on the hillside looking down over the city. I’ve spent many hours walking the gardens here with mother and father, who send their deepest warmth and love. They would write to you too, but Sirius shreds those letters. Miss Fig informed us that my letters are not quite reaching their target either, as Sirius seems to spot them before you and snatches them up. I doubt he reads them, ~~not after-~~ Mother assures me that one day you will read them, Sirius cannot keep you locked away for ever, he may have, somehow, won the Wizengamot case, with obvious meddling by Dumbledore I might add, but I spelled these pages to inform me if they were burnt or otherwise disposed, and as I have received no such telling, I am left to assume Sirius has them stashed somewhere collecting dust. He always did have a small soft spot for me. I'm just Slytherin enough to use it to my advantage. so I suppose that one day is enough for me now. Forever thinking of you, brother Reggie. _

Next.

_Bonjour ma petite sirène. That means my little mermaid in French. Do you enjoy the ocean? Swimming? There isn’t any sea in Saint Etienne, but the coast is never far away. We, our family, would come and take you there, if it was not for the blasted wards Sirius has hung up around the Potter estate shooing off anyone with a drop of Black blood apart from himself, and you of course, from stepping foot on Potter soil. Even uncle Alphard, who has been nothing but kind, as kind as a Black can be, to your father got cursed off the land when he tried to visit, coupled with a sojourn at Saint Mungo’s for three weeks. It seems it is fickle fate that Sirius is good at only three things. Trouble. Quidditch. And complex warding magic. Yet, I digress. Here we are, there you stay for now, and the sun is much too bright to be so dreary today. You must be nine by now, and off to Hogwarts so very soon. Two years, in fact. We shall meet then. Love, brother Reggie._

Next.

_Darling Lyra, you were not at Hogwarts this year. Mother, Father, and I spent hours waiting on the platform. I’ve never seen mother cry so hard before when the train finally pulled away and you had not come to board it. Nor become so enraged. She finally blasted Sirius’s face from the tapestry when we got home. I guess there is no going back now. We must have been fooling ourselves otherwise. Lucretia Malfoy, Narcissus’s betrothed, who’s father sits on the parental board, says you were excused attendance in place of home-schooling, signed off by your father and bloody Albus Dumbledore. That’s funny. Orion signed no such paperwork. Only Sirius. Then again, they’re calling you a Potter now, are they not? Pretending Lily did not have that stillborn boy in Saint Mungo’s. Pretending Sirius did not steal Grandfather’s Time-turner. Pretending those silver eyes came from James’s mother. Our meeting will have to wait, then. Not much longer, surely. San Sebastian this time of year is-_

Next.

_Dearest Lyra, the snows in St. Petersburg are truly enchanting this time of year. I-_

More.

_Beloved Lyra, you would adore the skies in Stockholm at night-_

_Darling Lyra, Shanghai is warm and humid, and-_

_Treasured Lyra, Monte Carlo is proving to be a rather delightful-_

More.

_Merry yuletide-_

_Happy solstice-_

_Lucky Samhain-_

_A bright and prosperous New Year to-_

More.

_With all my love, brother Reggie._

_Forever and a day yours, brother Reggie._

_Counting down the days, brother Reggie._

More.

_I was thinking of you this morning as I woke up-_

_You crossed my mind this evening-_

_I saw your name written in the stars, you know you have your own constellation, correct? All Blacks do. Look up tonight and you will see it, a little left of-_

Next letter.

Another.

_Another._

**_Another._ **

**_ Another. _ **

The last letter fell from her grasp, a bead of red on white and black.

Lyra peeked down to her hands, flexed those fingers before her.

_Papercuts._

Her fingers were peppered with papercuts. 

She did not feel the sting.

She could only think a single idea.

_I have never seen the sea._

Lyra had not seen Bulgaria, or St. Petersburg, or France or Italy, or much of anything apart from this house, in these woods, in these wards. Her own black box, her own black ribbon, her own lovely envelope.

She had seen oil paintings from Rome splattered on canvas.

Photographs in her books of Egypt and the Nile.

She had heard her mother speak of Cokeworth and summers in Cornwall.

Yet, Lyra had never seen the sea.

She had never been further than the sparsely rushed, barely thirty-minute-long, trips to Hogsmeade and back again by apparition.

Why had she never seen the sea?

Why had she never gone to Hogwarts?

Why had she never been allowed anywhere by herself?

Her diagnosis? Father had said it was best. Lyra was delicate. Over stimulation could be bad. Best to keep her at home. Best to keep her safe.

Safe from what?

Safe from _who?_

Herself? Who she no longer quite knew?

Uncle Regulus who signed his letters brother?

Albus Dumbledore, the one who had prohibited her from Hogwarts like every other child?

Lyra, letter by letter, envelope by red envelope, assembled her missives like pieces of a puzzle unmade, slipped them home in packets they had been interred in for years, and rolled one over.

Above her own address is another, pushed into a corner lip. A return address written in the same hand.

_12 Grimmauld Place · London Borough of Islington._

Lyra stacked them again, neatly. Binds them in their twine with papercut fingers.

But they do not go back into the draw.

They do not go back into the dark.

Family secrets were like that.

Once out, there was no going back.

They tumble safely into her hold as she left the study, knocking over the silver-frame photo of her and Sirius on her way.

Lyra didn’t even notice the glass fracture and splinter and _break_.

Lyra started up the stairs, increasing speed with each rung climbed.

_Thud… Thud… Thud, thud, thud, thudthud, thudthud, thudthudthudthud._

The letters were securely clutched to her chest.

Lyra got to the second-floor landing, she spun a curve, advancing towards the room at the end of the hall. Her back felt is if it was going to erupt with those thistledown wings. Throbbing and thumping with the beat of her footsteps. She was almost running by the time she reached the room.

Regulus had left the door ajar, a tacit encouragement.

She slipped through, like mould slipped into the alcoves of a house.

Regulus’s guest room was as immaculate as it had been before. Exactly the same. Cashmere jumper over chair back. Silver-brush on corner table. Suitcase by closet.

_Suitcase by closet._

Lyra latched on.

There was no hesitation as she went towards it, knelled down, placed letters by her hip, tipped it over on its fair back and reached for the clasps.

The time for hesitation was long past, vapourised somewhere between the first and third letter she read. 

There was no lock on the suitcase, no spell or charm or ward.

One last implicit invite.

Lyra grabbed the corners, pictured the little brown-haired girl in her mind, Andromeda, if the list could be believed, shaking her head.

_Don’t do it._

Lyra did it.

She swung the lid open.

As with the photos, as with the letters, Lyra flicked through the life inside the suitcase. Neatly pressed shirts. A silver silk waistcoat embroidered with emerald finger-nail sized snakes. Cufflinks in the silhouette of viper-fangs. Clean handkerchiefs embellished with R.A.B by the lace, one of which, a black one, Lyra stole into her skirt pocket on a whim.

And then, towards the bottom, as the last shirt was lifted free and left crumpled to the side, everything came to a jarring standstill. 

There was only one thing left in the suitcase.

Hands trembling violently, Lyra stretched in and pulled it out like one pulled the plug to a warm and cosy-protected bath.

Knowing the cold was coming.

The nakedness.

The wet exposure creeping on slick tile.

In her unsteady hold was a black box, with black ribbon, and a black gift tag.

**_ 16. _ **

Lyra heard Belenos cackling in her ear.

_“Who else indeed?”_

__

When you’re a child, you learn there are three dimensions. Height, width, and depth. Like a shoe box. Then, later you hear there was a fourth dimension. Time.

Lyra took this fourth dimension, and she stretched it out as far as she could. Coincidentally, this was not very far and not very long.

She took the black box over to Regulus’s bed, left his suitcase tipped and spilled across the floor, red letters on carpet like a bloodstain, and sat at the very edge of the cool covers. That felt good. That felt right. On the verge of something inside as she was outside.

She placed the box to her side, looked down her legs to her boots.

During this time, for she has had fifteen others, Lyra felt a bit like a snake. As if she was shedding her skin, cutting scales, expanding an inch in tatters. Those red boots were as much her as her face, as her hands, as her eyes, and without them she felt raw and tender and new.

Where once they were smooth, now there were creases and folds, little map-making connections, suppleness that comes with age, with the passage of feet over so many paths.

As people could grow tired, shoes could too.

Perhaps it was time for her boots to rest.

Lyra bent down, hooked fingers into laces, and pulled.

The knot unravelled.

She toed them off.

They fell to the floor, a snaking ghostly skin in the grass.

She picked up the black box, unthreaded the bow, opened the cap, and brushed away the brittle tissue paper.

There were no boots waiting for her this time.

The pumps were suede, leather with the flesh side rubbed to make a velvety nap, open and high-backed like a throne. A darker red. Plum red. The soles were deep, suturing graceful, the heel just the right surplus of femininity and pragmatism.

On the back, a tiny satin black bow.

Lyra had spent her life running in flat boots, clunking in thickets and groves, maladroit. Heels had never been a part of that world.

As the sea had not been.

She wanted that sea.

She wanted those heels.

Lyra placed them on the floor before her, troopers standing guard.

She sank her toes in, twisting in her arch, and slanted down her heel.

A perfect fit.

Plush and soft and high.

Lyra stood.

She felt lofty in those high heels, as if the room, and the house, and the woods, and the world were her stage.

When she left the room later, carrying an empty black box and an opened stack of letters, the suitcase was packed carefully, everything left where it had been.

Apart from her red old boots.

She left those on Regulus’s pillow.

It was night, deep into the dark twilight, and Lyra sat at the grand piano, the one she swore never to touch again, unsure of what to do with herself. She hadn’t been sure since she had gone to burn a blue jay nest and, instead, freed a casket full of caterpillars.

She had heard Lily come in from the kitchen’s hours ago, heard her gossiping to Regulus, their indistinct voices white noise on the back of her eyelids, calling half-heartedly for her somewhere in the foyer.

Lyra had not answered.

Lily had possibly assumed she was still in the woods.

Giggling, Lily had retreated upstairs, past the closed door of her den, past Lyra, two pairs of footsteps fading.

Lyra wondered if Regulus saw her boots on his pillow then as he retired for the night, leaving muddy imprints on his unspoiled linens, marking it her own way with traces of herself, declaring she had been there, she had occupied, she had _taken_.

Likely, he had not.

Possibly, he was in Lily’s rooms drinking wine and talking taxes.

Lyra’s hands settled fixed on the keys of the piano before her, on the music rack above the fall board, no sheet music but a rumpled handkerchief. **_R.A.B_**

She was utterly alone there, in the gloom.

No Lily.

No Regulus.

No Miss Fig.

No James.

No Sirius.

Just her, spry fingers, and tiny black satin bows on heels steadied on brass peddles.

She sat there, mute, still, longer than she could count, until she was sure there was no longer anyone there to hear.

Her serene face, her Black face, her devastating face, undulated with the tiniest of shudders, as if her facade were suffering an earthquake, tectonic plates grinding, forming an entirely new continent.

A Pangea for Pandora. The girl who kept opening boxes.

A deep breath in, and Lyra began to play. It was the same song as the one she played before Sirius’s and James’s funeral.

However, this time, her playing wavered, sceptical of itself. Lyra fumbled with the notes, one after the other, dropping tones and bars and mixing keys.

It wasn’t _feeling_ right. Like ants on skin, nipping, devouring her alive, like pine needle stitches.

Lyra stopped, and started over.

Again, the music failed, again, her fingers collapse in on her, again her senses betray.

Lyra stopped.

The music was refusing to come. Her fingers and face shivered. She swallowed hard, like there was something caught in her throat. Tears? A scream? Laughter?

Lyra wasn’t too sure, but it _hurt._

She closed her eyes, let her fingers float in the air, and she kept them closed for, all over again, time uncountable.

Seconds, minutes, hours later, she blinked.

Regulus stood in the pale light of the window, next to her piano, bathed silver and black, shirt untucked, blazer off, feet bare.

He didn’t speak, not in the way ordinary people did.

He spoke in her language.

He brushed her across the bench gently, slipped in on the buckskin and birch, thighs and knees knocking warmth against her own, and he started to play.

Beautifully.

It was the same piece Lyra had been trying to play before, but this time it was changed, this time it was evocative with passion and those tricky emotions.

With feeling and _touch._

The ants and pine needles shifted to raindrops and stardust.

Regulus had told her it was the Black curse, tactile synesthesia. He had gone as far as saying Belenos had it too, and some nameless, faceless relatives… But he had not said he, himself, did not.

He does.

She could see it.

A sense within a sense, an entangled copse of stimulus. 

It was showing through the goosebumps trailing up his forearm, dappled delight like golden freckles to kiss, the same path spreading down her own arms.

He knew.

Lyra sat there, mesmerized, listening to the piece like she had never heard it before.

She glanced up, from Regulus’s fingertips to his face, as if she could see the nerves there, constellations only they could see. He seemed lost to the music, lost to the keys, utterly immersed. He hadn’t looked at her once.

Lyra peered back down, set her fingers to the keys, and started to play.

If he wanted to speak, she would sing.

She was timid at first, a colt creeping into a clearing, careful, concocting a quiet concord to his melody. However, she gained confidence rapidly.

Music did not come.

It _flowed._

One just had to open the dam.

Their peculiar partnership grew into something natural and green. A minor piece for two hands becoming a major one for four.

The music started to swell, the cadence quickened in a womb, and Lyra could feel herself flushing. Scorching. Sticky and slick in places, like honey and treacle, and everything sweet.

She stole another glance at Regulus.

He was pounding away at the keys, thrashing a beat, harried spinning cords so interlocked, so intimate, and Lyra snaked through them, pitching moonlight, faster than he, able to reach the small spaces, the in between, where he could not. She tied the loops, and wrapped the sweeps, and crossed the kisses where fingers gathered.

She couldn't tell where their lines ended and began. 

Lyra looked back down, forgetting Regulus entirely, and their hands glided across the keyboard. Faster and faster. Caressing and coaxing, shooting and demanding-

Regulus didn’t like being ignored for too long.

He stretched around her, hooked a warm arm around her waist to coil at the major scale on her side. His elbow pressed into her hip, she slipped closer, but that was just confetti. Her legs crossed, one heeled foot winding through a spread leg to press at the far brass peddle to hollow out the belly of the piano, to make the keys and notes _surge._

It became fast then, almost too fast to keep up, too much of too much west of a northern star, amorous and roiling, ruthless, cooked up in a lightening storm. She careened, he thrusted, she dipped, he dived, around a spiral and down a sharp, shocking drop.

They went hurtling into the final climactic chords, headfirst and hedonistic, their combined sustain ringing throughout the silent house, brilliant lights and breathy sighs, and-

And then it was over.

Lyra disconnected her hands from the keys, falling into her lap, gently, as if they might have broken. Perhaps they already had, in a way. Broken _in_ as music had broken _out._

She freed her foot last, slunk it back through the bend of a curved knee, the open invitation she kept taking, and for a while they simply sat in silence, breathing in the dark, quivering thigh pressed against quivering thigh.

Until he turned to her and she to him, damp sweat glistening in ebony locks brushing clammy forehead. Regulus, right then, looked like he had been left outside all night, Lyra thought, and had come home covered in morning dew.

Or sea spray.

“I want to see the ocean at Nessebar.”

Something spurs in his gaze, she could roughly hear the snap, and Lyra knew where that silver-sand stare was going to go before it began the journey down to her feet.

Regulus saw the dark suede shoes, not her little red boots.

He glanced back up.

He smiled.

“Then to the Nessebar we go, but first, how about London?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos if you can spot the Paterson quote squirrelled away in this chapter. I want to try and make a story as equally grotesque as it is sort of beautiful. How could I not include that Stoker piano scene? The sea at Nessebar is the Black Sea coast, which is tongue in cheek enough for me.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by Stoker (2013). Most themes and scenes have been reworked or are completely new, and the ending of this fic is completely different to what happens in the film, but there is inspiration taken there that is due to be recognized.


End file.
